I have two favorite biographies of the same woman: Harriet Tubman. Harriet was regularly in NY’s Capital District during her active life: visiting relatives in Troy, raising money for her rescues and sometimes just raising Cain (see Scott Christianson, Freeing Charles: The Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War (2020)). The two very different biographies of Harriet Tubman are Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The road to Freedom (2005) and Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the promised land: Harriet Tubman, portrait of an American hero (2004). These biographies are getting fairly long in the tooth, but they represent sound scholarship that has not been superseded.
I am going with Carol Faulkner’s 2013 bio: Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century American. Mott (1793–1880) was an American Quaker, abolitionist, women’s rights activist, social reformer, and Philly homegirl.
Mott was an anti-slavery thought leader years before the renowned William Lloyd Garrison. The author contends that in many ways, “Mott was more Garrisonian than Garrison himself. She was also present at the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, a body she operated for 36 years.
Similarly, Mott’s advocacy for women’s rights was already a long-held part of her inner light ethos – her “responsibility as a rational and immortal being.” For Mott, the subjugation of women and slavery were inseparable “threats to individual liberty wrought by mindless tradition and greed.” Women’s rights were always part of her life-long struggle for human rights.
While many woman’s rights activists devoted their lives to their cause, Mott’s Quaker beliefs required her to allot equal time to her vocation and her family. She and her husband were married fifty-seven years, she had five children who grew to adulthood, and she was a doting grand and great grandmother.
I highly recommend Faulkner’s very human portrait of this great American — a devoted wife, caring mother and relentless crusader.
That is a good catch Tim, thanks. The Mott home, called Roadside (since torn down), was next to the camp. After the war, local businessmen and bankers helped Free African Americans and Freedman build homes and businesses on the site of the camp. The residents called the neighborhood Camptown in honor of the USCT soldiers. When Camptown grew large enough for a post office, the residents learned they would need a new name since a Camptown Post Office already existed in Western PA. In 1885, they chose the name La Mott after their old neighbor Lucretia. PS — I think I wrote a review for ECW of Faulkner’s back in 2021 or 22? And great blog BTW.
I’m writing one, about two women, one from Pennsylvania, one from Virginia, whose husbands were connected in one of the most fascinating incidents of the war.
I vote for “Southern Lady, Yankee Spy” by Elizabeth Varon, the best bio we have of Elizabeth Van Lew. The most effective spymaster of the whole war, her story is amazing and dramatic. It recently got turned into an opera in Houston, TX. Even though there are many chunks of her story that are missing and/or still controversial, what is known is quite compelling. After the war, she decided to stay in her hometown of Richmond–so she actively participated in destroying the paper trail of her own legacy of fighting against slavery. She was even allowed to enter the National Archives and destroy any records regarding her activities. So we don’t know a lot of details.
However, we do know that her spying was considered so valuable by General Grant (who would know!) that one of his first acts on taking the city was to visit her at her mansion. Bringing his beloved wife Julia along, they shared tea on her porch. Then, after the war, when she was impoverished and no one in Richmond would help her, Grant made the very controversial decision to make her Postmistress of Richmond when he became President—the most plumb job he could offer. And despite protests from Southerners, Grant kept her in that spot for the entire 8 years he was President.
Author Varon, who just recently released a new book about the life of Longstreet, took the first serious look at Van Lew and not only her war work, but how she lived in Richmond for decades after as a pariah to everyone except the Black community—who knew what she had risked and lost to aid them.
I read many volumes about her because of her role in the Libby Prison breakout, the subject of my book “The Greatest Escape, a True American Civil War Adventure”, and this is the best of them all.
Not a biography, per se, but Letters of a Civil War Nurse, about the wartime experience of Cornelia Hancock, is a clear-eyed and unsentimental look at the aftermath of battle. Arriving in Gettysburg on July 6, she “saw for the first time what war meant. Hundreds of desperately wounded men were stretched out on boards laid across the high-backed pews as closely as they could be packed together. The boards were covered with straw. Thus elevated, these poor sufferers’ faces, white and drawn with pain, were almost on a level with my own. I seemed to stand breast-high in a sea of anguish.” Edited by Henrietta Stratton Jaquette, from University of Nebraska Press.
I have two favorite biographies of the same woman: Harriet Tubman. Harriet was regularly in NY’s Capital District during her active life: visiting relatives in Troy, raising money for her rescues and sometimes just raising Cain (see Scott Christianson, Freeing Charles: The Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War (2020)). The two very different biographies of Harriet Tubman are Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The road to Freedom (2005) and Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the promised land: Harriet Tubman, portrait of an American hero (2004). These biographies are getting fairly long in the tooth, but they represent sound scholarship that has not been superseded.
I am going with Carol Faulkner’s 2013 bio: Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century American. Mott (1793–1880) was an American Quaker, abolitionist, women’s rights activist, social reformer, and Philly homegirl.
Mott was an anti-slavery thought leader years before the renowned William Lloyd Garrison. The author contends that in many ways, “Mott was more Garrisonian than Garrison himself. She was also present at the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, a body she operated for 36 years.
Similarly, Mott’s advocacy for women’s rights was already a long-held part of her inner light ethos – her “responsibility as a rational and immortal being.” For Mott, the subjugation of women and slavery were inseparable “threats to individual liberty wrought by mindless tradition and greed.” Women’s rights were always part of her life-long struggle for human rights.
While many woman’s rights activists devoted their lives to their cause, Mott’s Quaker beliefs required her to allot equal time to her vocation and her family. She and her husband were married fifty-seven years, she had five children who grew to adulthood, and she was a doting grand and great grandmother.
I highly recommend Faulkner’s very human portrait of this great American — a devoted wife, caring mother and relentless crusader.
????
Mott also donated land for Camp William Penn, a major recruiting and training center for United States Colored Troops regiments.
That is a good catch Tim, thanks. The Mott home, called Roadside (since torn down), was next to the camp. After the war, local businessmen and bankers helped Free African Americans and Freedman build homes and businesses on the site of the camp. The residents called the neighborhood Camptown in honor of the USCT soldiers. When Camptown grew large enough for a post office, the residents learned they would need a new name since a Camptown Post Office already existed in Western PA. In 1885, they chose the name La Mott after their old neighbor Lucretia. PS — I think I wrote a review for ECW of Faulkner’s back in 2021 or 22? And great blog BTW.
I’m writing one, about two women, one from Pennsylvania, one from Virginia, whose husbands were connected in one of the most fascinating incidents of the war.
I vote for “Southern Lady, Yankee Spy” by Elizabeth Varon, the best bio we have of Elizabeth Van Lew. The most effective spymaster of the whole war, her story is amazing and dramatic. It recently got turned into an opera in Houston, TX. Even though there are many chunks of her story that are missing and/or still controversial, what is known is quite compelling. After the war, she decided to stay in her hometown of Richmond–so she actively participated in destroying the paper trail of her own legacy of fighting against slavery. She was even allowed to enter the National Archives and destroy any records regarding her activities. So we don’t know a lot of details.
However, we do know that her spying was considered so valuable by General Grant (who would know!) that one of his first acts on taking the city was to visit her at her mansion. Bringing his beloved wife Julia along, they shared tea on her porch. Then, after the war, when she was impoverished and no one in Richmond would help her, Grant made the very controversial decision to make her Postmistress of Richmond when he became President—the most plumb job he could offer. And despite protests from Southerners, Grant kept her in that spot for the entire 8 years he was President.
Author Varon, who just recently released a new book about the life of Longstreet, took the first serious look at Van Lew and not only her war work, but how she lived in Richmond for decades after as a pariah to everyone except the Black community—who knew what she had risked and lost to aid them.
I read many volumes about her because of her role in the Libby Prison breakout, the subject of my book “The Greatest Escape, a True American Civil War Adventure”, and this is the best of them all.
Not a biography, per se, but Letters of a Civil War Nurse, about the wartime experience of Cornelia Hancock, is a clear-eyed and unsentimental look at the aftermath of battle. Arriving in Gettysburg on July 6, she “saw for the first time what war meant. Hundreds of desperately wounded men were stretched out on boards laid across the high-backed pews as closely as they could be packed together. The boards were covered with straw. Thus elevated, these poor sufferers’ faces, white and drawn with pain, were almost on a level with my own. I seemed to stand breast-high in a sea of anguish.” Edited by Henrietta Stratton Jaquette, from University of Nebraska Press.
The memoir of Susie King Taylor.