The cheese was enormous. It created quite a stir at the lucrative antislavery fair in Boston, an event renowned more for its elegant and tasteful European imports than its dairy products. Fairgoers listened to the eloquence of antislavery luminaries Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison; perused the slogans on delicately embroidered Scottish-made handbags; admired silver jewelry boxes from London; took in the scent of evergreen, which graced tables throughout Boston’s famed Faneuil Hall; and eagerly tasted the western cheese.¹ Betsey Mix Cowles and her sister abolitionists of the Ashtabula County Female Anti-Slavery Society in the Ohio Western Reserve had donated...

The two knew each other by reputation only. Lucy Wright, sister of famed abolitionist Elizur Wright, had just returned home to Tallmadge, Ohio, after spending nearly two years working as a teacher in African American schools in Cincinnati.¹ Betsey Mix Cowles, who lived only eighty miles from Wright, had recently founded the Ashtabula County Female Anti-Slavery Society, which eventually became the largest and most influential women’s group in the Old Northwest.² In March 1836, Wright wrote to congratulate Cowles for her zealous advocacy of antislavery and to offer encouragement. A year before the Grimké sisters would lecture to “promiscuous” audiences...

Mary Davis must have been scandalized when a “gentleman” sat in her lap. She had gone to Chicago’s City Hall to hear famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass discuss the state’s Black Laws, the importance of political antislavery, and the Fugitive Slave Act.¹ A longtime admirer of Douglass, Davis was eager to listen to his lecture. When she arrived, however, the “house was crowded to its utmost capacity—high and low, rich and poor, black and white.” At fifty-three years old, she doubted she could stand for the entire talk. Her extensive antislavery experience had taught her that these meetings often ran...

In March 1833, Michigan abolitionist Elizabeth Chandler shrewdly used her ladies’ column in theGenius of Universal Emancipationto publish a letter from Ohio’s Green Plain Free Produce Society. Hoping to highlight the compelling rationale for rejecting slave-made goods in favor of “pure” free-labor products, Chandler added an important western voice to the Pennsylvania-based free produce movement. The mixed-sex Green Plain group, nearly a year old, was responding to an offer from a Philadelphia free produce group to supply free-labor cotton. Pleased to receive this proposal “to procure the conveniences of life free from the stain of our brothers’ blood,”...

They sent the box to Cincinnati. This infuriated the Salem, Ohio, Garrisonians. Sarah MacMillan made every effort to remain polite in her letter to Anne Warren Weston, but the exasperation behind her words burst through. Why, MacMillan inquired, had Weston’s powerful Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society failed to send the Salem abolitionists the promised box of goods for their annual fair? Initially, MacMillan explained, the Salem organizers had assumed that the unpredictability of winter had prevented the box from arriving. However, she fumed, “we have now learned that a box of Boston goods has been forwarded to Cincinnati to the Society...

The Quakers accosted her. An experienced and road-weary Garrisonian lecturer from Massachusetts, Abby Kelley had encountered hostile audiences across the Northeast for nearly a decade. She had come to the Old Northwest in June 1845 at the invitation of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society. By the time she arrived at the Orthodox Yearly Meeting of Quakers in Mount Pleasant, she had been lecturing across the state for four months. The usually nonviolent Quakers reacted surprisingly fiercely to her, however. Only a few minutes after she rose to offer an unsolicited antislavery speech, she was asked to sit down and be quiet....

In the late summer of 1854, as the nation confronted the growing controversy around the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which reaffirmed the West as a battleground between slavery and freedom, abolitionists met in Salem, Ohio, for the twelfth annual meeting of the Western Anti-Slavery Society.¹ Most of the region’s leading Garrisonian women were there, including Josephine Griffing and fellow lecturer Lizzie Hitchcock, who would serve as vice presidents, as well as Cincinnati powerhouse Sarah Otis Ernst, who participated on the Business Committee. The issue of fugitive slaves making their way north to freedom through Ohio dominated discussions. Several resolutions proclaimed the moral...

Eliza T. Frantz wrote to theAnti-Slavery Buglein March 1856 to update readers on the reform environment in her small northern Indiana town, Warsaw, which she characterized as “dark and benighted.” She confessed that she had spent much of her two years there “sunk in hopeless despair thinking, that no good could come out of Sodom.” Her spirits lifted, however, when she initiated a “series of debates on Woman’s rights” that resulted in “quite a victory.” She, “two sisters,” and “a young Baptist who dared to declare the rights of woman” organized several meetings that attracted large, enthusiastic audiences....

In reply to a request from Susan B. Anthony to write down her memories of woman’s rights activism in the antebellum West, Emily Rakestraw Robinson included a brief antislavery reminiscence. In “Our Old Anti-Slavery Tent,” Robinson described the life span of a canvas tent, a piece of which she included in the letter. After hosting revival meetings in western New York, the tent housed the 1843 Liberty Party convention in Buffalo that nominated James G. Birney for president. The shelter soon found its way to Ohio, providing cover as young abolitionist students graduated from Oberlin College in the 1840s before...