She never asked. She acted. She paid.
This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary needs to be remembered.
THE PERSON
She was twenty-five years old when she first appeared in print. Frederick Douglass had asked the readers of his newspaper how to improve Black life in America. She wrote back six words that ended the question.
“We should do more and talk less.”
Douglass printed it. They became lifelong friends.
Mary Ann Camberton Shadd was born free in Wilmington, Delaware on October 9, 1823, the eldest of thirteen children. Her father Abraham was a shoemaker, a subscriber to William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, and a conductor on the Underground Railroad. The Shadd home was a station. She grew up watching fugitives sheltered overnight before being moved north. Delaware barred the education of Black children. The family moved to West Chester, Pennsylvania so she could go to school. She attended a Quaker boarding school until 1839. At sixteen she returned to Wilmington and opened a school of her own. The Quaker education had given her what Delaware would not, and the conviction that her duty was to give it to others.
She had been teaching for nine years when she sent the letter to Douglass.
THE CONTEXT
In September 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. Federal marshals could seize a suspected runaway anywhere in the United States. No jury. No testimony from the accused. The accused could be moved from Massachusetts to Mississippi within a week. Free Black northerners — born free, citizens of free states — were suddenly vulnerable on a white claimant’s word.
Twenty thousand American-born Black people crossed into Canada between 1800 and 1865. The Shadd family was among them. In September 1851, Mary Ann attended the North American Convention of Coloured Freemen at St. Lawrence Hall in Toronto. She was the only Black woman in the room. Henry and Mary Bibb were there. They persuaded her to take a teaching post in Sandwich, across the river from Detroit. She settled there in 1851 and opened an integrated school with money from the American Missionary Association.
In 1852 she published A Plea for Emigration; or, Notes of Canada West — forty-four pages telling Black Americans to leave the United States and build self-reliant lives across the border. It was the only settler guide of its era written for Black readers.
Then she picked a fight with Henry Bibb. Bibb published Canada’s first Black-owned newspaper. He favored segregated Black settlements and church-administered relief. She attacked both as dependencies that copied slavery’s hierarchies. Bibb retaliated. The American Missionary Association cut off her school’s funding.
She lost the school. She kept the argument.
THE DECISION
She made two decisions ten years apart. They were the same decision.
The first was on March 24, 1853, in Windsor. She published the first issue of The Provincial Freeman. No woman of any race had ever edited a newspaper on the North American continent. The motto on the masthead was hers: Self-Reliance is the True Road to Independence.
She knew the convention. A woman’s name on a masthead would kill the paper before it reached its third issue. She put Samuel Ringgold Ward’s name on it instead. Ward was a celebrated Black abolitionist and a former escaped slave. He agreed to lend his name. She did the editing.
In 1854 she moved the paper to Toronto. She put her own name on the masthead. The reaction was brutal. By 1855 she had been pressured out of the editorship publicly. Before she stepped back, she wrote in the June 30 issue:
“To colored women, we have a word — we have broken the editorial ice, whether willingly or not, for your class in America, so go to editing.”
The Provincial Freeman was already enough. She could have stopped. She did not stop.
The paper covered more than abolition. She ran columns on Black women’s education, attacks on the American Colonization Society’s plan to send Black people to Liberia, exchanges with Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and detailed coverage of Underground Railroad escapes. She traveled across Canada and the northern United States to raise subscriptions, smuggling copies back across the border into the country she had left.
In May 1858 John Brown came to Chatham to plan the raid that would come at Harper’s Ferry. He stayed among her circle. Her brother Isaac chaired the convention Brown held to draft a provisional constitution for the rising he believed was coming. When the raid failed in October 1859 and the only Black survivor, Osborne P. Anderson, escaped north, Shadd Cary helped him write and publish A Voice from Harper’s Ferry — the only firsthand Black account of the raid.
The second decision came on December 7, 1863. Martin R. Delany wrote to her from the Union Army. He had been authorized to recruit Black soldiers. He needed help. He asked her to come back across the border.
She had not been across the border in twelve years. She had crossed the first time to keep her family alive. She crossed back to fill an army.
She recruited for the 29th Connecticut Colored Infantry across the Midwest. The state of Indiana had to issue her a letter of safe passage so she would not be arrested in transit. Governor Oliver P. Morton signed it on February 19, 1864. Five days later Colonel Benjamin S. Pardee of Connecticut authorized her “as my agent to obtain men.” The 29th Connecticut mustered on March 8, 1864 with at least a thousand men. She recruited for the 30th as well.
She was the first Black woman to hold an official commission as a Union Army recruiting agent. She held it without rank. Without pay. Without thanks.
THE AFTERMATH
Her husband Thomas Cary had died in 1860. The paper was gone. She had two small children. She came home from the war to Washington, D.C., and started teaching in the public schools.
In 1869, at forty-six, she enrolled in the first class of Howard University’s School of Law. She was the first Black woman to enter a law school in the United States. The university refused to grant her degree when she completed the coursework. They cited her sex. She fought it. The degree was conferred on her in 1883, at sixty.
She testified before the House Judiciary Committee on women’s suffrage in 1874, alongside Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. She founded the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise Association in 1880 — a decade ahead of the formal Black Club Women’s Movement. She kept writing. She died of stomach cancer in Washington on June 5, 1893.
At her funeral the Reverend Daniel Payne said: “She ranks among the reformers of the time. She left to others to carry forward the torch she had ignited.”
The Provincial Freeman itself vanished from public memory. Bound issues were rediscovered in the 1950s at the University of Pennsylvania library by a graduate student looking for something else. The paper had to be found again. She did not.
THE MEANING
The thread of her life is what she refused to ask.
- She did not ask the American Missionary Association whether she might criticize Henry Bibb.
- She did not ask the Canadian print trade whether a woman might own a press.
- She did not ask the U.S. Army whether a Black woman might wear the recruiter’s authority.
- She did not ask Howard whether a woman of sixty might practice law.
She acted. Then she forced the institution around her to reckon with what she had already done.
The decision in 1853 and the decision in 1863 are the same decision. She decided what was right. She did it. She absorbed the cost.
The cost in 1855 was being driven from her own masthead. The cost in 1864 was a regiment in the field.
She never asked.
She acted.
She paid.
* * * * *
Sources: Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Indiana University Press, 1998); Mary Ann Shadd, A Plea for Emigration; or, Notes of Canada West (1852, full text at Internet Archive, oocihm.47542); surviving issues of The Provincial Freeman (1853–1857) digitized by the Black Abolitionist Papers project and the University of Windsor; Mary Ann Shadd Cary Collection, Library and Archives Canada (R4182-0-X-E); National Museum of Civil War Medicine, “Mary Ann Shadd Cary: A Union Army Recruiter”; W.E.B. DuBois, “The Damnation of Women,” in Darkwater (1920); Megan Specia, “Overlooked No More,” The New York Times (June 6, 2018); National Park Service file on the Mary Ann Shadd Cary House, 1421 W Street NW, Washington, D.C.; Jason H. Silverman, “Shadd, Mary Ann Camberton (Cary),” Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1990).
Next in this series: Robert Carter III — The Richest Man in Virginia Who Freed His Slaves.
Charles C. Jett is a Naval Academy graduate, Harvard MBA, former Cold War submarine officer, executive search professional, and Professional Certified Coach (PCC). He writes at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com.
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