Julia Ward Williams Garnet (July 1, 1811 - January 7, 1870) was an American abolitionist who was active in Massachusetts and New York.
Born free in Charleston, South Carolina, she moved with her family as a child to Boston, Massachusetts, and was educated in the North. A member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, she attended the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in New York in 1837. She married abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet and in 1852 they traveled to Jamaica to work as missionaries, where she headed an industrial school for girls. After the American Civil War, she worked with freedmen in Washington, D.C. to establish their new lives.
Julia Ward Williams was born to free people of color in Charleston, South Carolina in 1811. Her family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, when she was a child. She had two younger sisters, Ann and Diana. [1]
Williams was 21 years old when she traveled to Canterbury, Connecticut, to attend Prudence Crandall's Canterbury Female Boarding School, a school for "young Ladies and little Misses of color". After the school closed due to public violence, Williams went to the Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire. In 1835, it also had to close after violent opposition from local whites. [2] Williams completed her education at the Oneida Institute in New York. [3]
Williams became an outspoken advocate of abolition and African-American rights. Returning to Boston on a teaching appointment after her education, [4] : 268 she became a member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) during the 1830s. [5] She was one of four delegates from the BFASS who attended the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in New York in 1837. [6] [7]
In 1841 Williams married Henry Highland Garnet, a teacher, minister, and prominent African-American leader of the abolitionist movement who was based in New York City. They had first met as students at the Noyes Academy; he also completed his education at the Oneida Institute. He wrote of her, 'O what [a] lovely being she is! Most susceptible and chaste. She seems to have everything which beautifys a female. A good Christian, and a scholar.' [8] They had three children but only one, Mary Garnet Barboza, survived to adulthood. [9]
While Garnet was pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Troy, New York, the pair welcomed people who had escaped from slavery into their church. [10]
Julia supported her husband in his ministry, reading and advising on his speeches, running women’s literary associations, teaching Sunday School, and taking over the ministry while he traveled on speaking engagements. [11] [12]
Julia continued her campaigning for abolition in New York, working with the Female Benevolent Society of Troy, [13] and running fundraising bazaars for the anti-slavery newspaper Impartial Citizen. [14]
During the American Civil War, she founded The Ladies’ Committee for the Aid of Sick Soldiers, which supplied 60 soldiers with food. [15]
In 1851, she travelled to London to chair the Free Labor Bazaar at the World Peace Congress. [16]
In 1852, the Garnet family traveled to the Caribbean island of Jamaica to work as missionaries. Julia headed a Female Industrial School. They returned to the United States after a few years because of her husband's health needs. They settled in Washington, DC, where he was minister of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church. After the Civil War, Julia Garnet worked with freedmen in the capital. She died in their home in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. [17] on January 7, 1870 (aged 58) [2]
Anna Maria Weems lived in the Garnet household, joining them in their journey to Jamaica. [18] [19]
In 1858 she learned that her youngest sister Diana and Diana’s daughter Cornelia Read had been enslaved. After a fund-raising effort, Diana and Cornelia were redeemed from slavery by Julia’s brother-in-law, Rev. James Stafford. Cornelia went on to marry Civil War veteran William B. Gould. [20]
In 2014 the Prudence Crandall Museum was preparing an exhibit interpreting the life of Williams, but the school site has undergone restoration and does not have exhibits as of 2022, only tours. [21]
Maria Weston Chapman was an American abolitionist. She was elected to the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839 and from 1839 until 1842, she served as editor of the anti-slavery journal The Non-Resistant.
Henry Highland Garnet was an American abolitionist, minister, educator and orator. Having escaped as a child from slavery in Maryland with his family, he grew up in New York City. He was educated at the African Free School and other institutions, and became an advocate of militant abolitionism. He became a minister and based his drive for abolitionism in religion.
Sarah Parker Remond was an American lecturer, activist and abolitionist campaigner.
Prudence Crandall was an American schoolteacher and activist. She ran the first school for black girls in the United States, located in Canterbury, Connecticut.
Abby Kelley Foster was an American abolitionist and radical social reformer active from the 1830s to 1870s. She became a fundraiser, lecturer and committee organizer for the influential American Anti-Slavery Society, where she worked closely with William Lloyd Garrison and other radicals. She married fellow abolitionist and lecturer Stephen Symonds Foster, and they both worked for equal rights for women and for Africans enslaved in the Americas.
Samuel Joseph May was an American reformer during the nineteenth century who championed education, women's rights, and abolition of slavery. May argued on behalf of all working people that the rights of humanity were more important than the rights of property, and advocated for minimum wages and legal limitations on the amassing of wealth.
The Noyes Academy was a racially integrated school, which also admitted women, founded by New England abolitionists in 1835 in Canaan, New Hampshire, near Dartmouth College, whose then-abolitionist president, Nathan Lord, was "the only seated New England college president willing to admit black students to his college".
The first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women was held in New York City on May 9–12, 1837, to discuss the American abolition movement. This gathering represented the first time that women from such a broad geographic area met with the common purpose of promoting the anti-slavery cause among women, and it also was likely the first major convention where women discussed women's rights. Some prominent women went on to be vocal members of the Women's Suffrage Movement, including Lucretia Mott, the Grimké sisters, and Lydia Maria Child. After the first convention in 1837, there were also conventions in 1838 and 1839
Andrew Thompson Judson was a United States representative from Connecticut and a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut. He also served in the Connecticut House of Representatives. He was a member of the Toleration Party and an officer of the American Colonization Society. A leading white supremacist, he led opposition to Prudence Crandall's school for African Americans in Connecticut and advocated for African Americans to be subjugated or sent to Africa. He also opposed the establishment of a college for African Americans in New Haven. As a judge in the United States v. The Amistad he ruled the enslaved captives aboard La Amistad be released and returned to Africa.
The Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (1833–1840) was an abolitionist, interracial organization in Boston, Massachusetts, in the mid-19th century. "During its brief history ... it orchestrated three national women's conventions, organized a multistate petition campaign, sued southerners who brought slaves into Boston, and sponsored elaborate, profitable fundraisers."
The Oneida Institute was a short-lived (1827–1843) but highly influential school that was a national leader in the emerging abolitionist movement. It was the most radical school in the country, the first at which black men were just as welcome as whites. "Oneida was the seed of Lane Seminary, Western Reserve College, Oberlin and Knox colleges."
Sarah Harris Fayerweather was an African-American activist, abolitionist, and school integrationist. Beginning in January 1833 at the age of twenty, she attended Prudence Crandall's Canterbury Female Boarding School in Canterbury, Connecticut, the first integrated school in the United States.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the late colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery, except as punishment for a crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Sarah Pugh was an American abolitionist, activist, suffragist, and teacher. She was involved with promoting the free produce movement, including a boycott on sugar produced by slave labor. She was a leader of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society from its earliest days in 1835 until it closed in 1870. Along with Lucretia Mott, Pugh was one of the delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London who were denied their seats because they were women.
The Canterbury Female Boarding School, in Canterbury, Connecticut, was operated by its founder, Prudence Crandall, from 1831 to 1834. When townspeople would not allow African-American girls to enroll, Crandall decided to turn it into a school for African-American girls only, the first such in the United States. The Connecticut legislature passed a law against it, and Crandall was arrested and spent a night in jail, bringing national publicity. Community violence forced Crandall to close the school.
The Phoenix Society, was a mutual aid society for African Americans and education, "an organization dedicated to 'morals, literature and the mechanical arts'". It was founded in 1833 by Samuel Cornish, Theodore Wright, Peter Williams Jr., and Christopher Rush in New York City. They had support from the philanthropist brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan. Many people associated with the Phoenix Society attended the New York Manumission Society’s African Free School in New York City.
Martha Violet Ball was a 19th-century American educator, philanthropist, activist, writer, and editor. Ball and her sister, Lucy, undertook the work of opening a school for young African American girls in the West End of Boston. In the same year, 1833, she assisted in the organization of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, of which she and Lucy held leadership roles. Her work among unfortunate women and girls led to the formation of the New England Female Moral Reform Society, with which she was from its beginning connected as Secretary and Manager. For twenty-five years, she was joint-editor of its organ, the Home Guardian, and was also affiliated in its department, "The Children's Fireside". She was a constituent member of the Ladies' Baptist Bethel Society, first as its Secretary and for thirty years its President. Ball was the first President of the Woman's Union Missionary Society of America for Heathen Lands, and a charter member of the New England Woman's Press Association. She was the author of several small, popular books.
Reuben Crandall, younger brother of educator Prudence Crandall, was a physician who was arrested in Washington, D.C., on August 10, 1835, on charges of "seditious libel and inciting slaves and free blacks to revolt", the libels being abolitionist materials portraying American slavery as cruel and sinful. He was nearly killed by a mob that wanted to hang him, and avoided that fate only because the mayor called out the militia. The Snow Riot ensued. Although a jury would find him innocent of all charges, his very high bail meant he remained in the Washington jail for almost eight months, where he contracted tuberculosis. He died soon after his release.
Charles Calistus Burleigh was an American journalist and abolitionist who fought against Connecticut's "Black Law" and enlisted participants in the Underground Railroad.
Mary Garnet Barboza was an African-American school founder and campaigner for women's education in Liberia.