Activism, Abolition, and Biracial Sisterhood in Michigan

This paper examines the antislavery activities of black and white women in Michigan in the 1850's.  Michigan was the last state that Southern freedom seekers entered in their long liberation trek, which ended when they crossed into Canada via the Detroit River.  The city of Detroit was proslavery.  But it was also home to the nucleus of Michigan’s Underground Railroad and the connecting point for the tentacles of activism that spread throughout the state. Southwestern Michigan and numerous little towns, villages and hamlets in the Detroit River Basin became underground cells and places of resort for the dissemination of antislavery rhetoric. The primary conduits for both kinds of activism were black and white abolitionist women, well known to each other and working in consort with the Detroit underground leadership. My paper will focus on Laura Smith Haviland of Adrian; Eliza Seaman Leggett of Pontiac and Detroit; Phoebe Hart Merritt of Battle Creek; Sojourner Truth of Harmonia; Frances Ellen Watkins of Ohio; and Mary Ann Shadd Cary of Windsor, Chatham and Toronto, Canada.  In exploring the working and personal relationships between these women, I hope to make an important statement about the often ignored role of western women in the antislavery movement; the significance of taking a transnational approach to the antislavery movement that looks not so much to Britain as to Canada; and to further the scholarship on biracial sisterhood in the antebellum era.