I’m excited to have two inspiring abolitionists make cameo appearances in my next time travel novel. Both lived in Philadelphia where the story takes place in the 1850s.
Lucretia Mott was a tiny Quaker woman who fought long and hard to persuade white Americans to abolish the sin of slavery. Mott was also an activist for women’s rights. She called the two movements “kindred crusades.”
Of course, a lot of Quakers were abolitionists. Known during that time as The Society of Friends, it was the first organization to denounce slavery in the 1600s. By the mid-1700s anti-slavery sentiment had taken a firmer hold, including in Philadelphia, where many Quakers supported the abolitionist cause. Many also hid runaway slaves in their homes, including Mott, as part of the Underground Railroad.
William Still was a free Black man whose parents escaped slavery, settling in New Jersey. He moved to Philadelphia and was chairman of the Vigilance Committee of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. In that role, he became a conductor for the Underground Railroad, helping to coordinate the effort to assist slaves escaping the south and finding homes and work in the north. After the Civil War, he published a book containing the stories of hundreds of escaped slaves and continued to work for the civil rights of Black Americans.
I’m delighted to feature both in my forthcoming novel which, hopefully, will be published by year’s end. I highly recommend Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America by Carol Faulkner and I’m looking forward to a new biography of William Still to be published in April.
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