A Life for Liberty; Anti-Slavery and Other Letters (Paperback or Softback)

Sallie Holley gave forty years to the anti-slavery cause, and the letters gathered in A Life for Liberty follow her from Oberlin lecture rooms to a schoolhouse in rural Virginia.

First published in 1899 and edited by the Unitarian minister John White Chadwick, this volume sets Holley's correspondence inside a narrative of her life. Born in 1818, she was the daughter of Myron Holley, a founder of the Liberty Party, and she left Oberlin College in 1851 to lecture for the American Anti-Slavery Society at a time when very few women spoke in public at all. Her letters record hostile audiences, long journeys by rail and stage, and friendships with Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith, and others in the movement.

After 1865 Holley joined Caroline Putnam in Lottsburg, Virginia, where she and Putnam founded and ran a school for families freed from bondage, work that occupied her until her death in 1893. Chadwick's chapters carry the story through to that final phase, so the volume reads as both a personal record and a first-hand account of American reform across the whole of the nineteenth century.

This edition features:

• The complete 1899 text of Chadwick's memoir, built around Holley's own letters to family, friends, and fellow reformers
• Sixteen chapters running from an upstate New York childhood to her last years in the Virginia countryside
• A rare first-hand view of the American Anti-Slavery Society's lecture circuit from a woman on the platform
• The founding of the Holley School at Lottsburg, Virginia, and its long work in the education of freed families
• Portraits and illustrations reproduced from the original, published in 1899