Oneida County, New York, for young women, on the manual-labor system,
she decided to go there; but her health being such as to make manual
labor impossible at the time, she wrote to the principal of the Clover
Street Seminary, Rochester, New York, who generously received her,
taking her notes for the school bills, to be paid after completing her
education. Grateful for this noble act, she afterward sent her younger
sister there to be educated, for her own associate as a teacher; and
the death of this talented sister, when about to graduate and come as
her assistant in Washington, fell upon her with crushing force. In the
Rochester school, with Myrtilla Miner, were two free Colored girls,
and this association was the first circumstance to turn her thoughts
to the work to which she gave her life. From Rochester she went to
Mississippi, as a teacher of planters' daughters, and it was what she
was compelled to see, in this situation, of the dreadful practices and
conditions of slavery, that filled her soul with a pity for the
Colored race, and a detestation of the system that bound them, which
held possession of her to the last day of her life. She remained there
several years, till her indignant utterances, which she would not
withhold, compelled her employer, fearful of the results, to part
reluctantly with a teacher whom he valued. She came home broken down
with sickness, caused by the harassing sights and sounds that she had
witnessed in plantation life, and while in this condition she made a
solemn vow that whatever of life remained to her should be given to
the work of ameliorating the condition of the Colored people. Here her
great work begins. She made up her mind to do something for the
education of free Colored girls, with the idea that through the
influence of educated Colored women she could lay the solid
foundations for the disenthrallment of their race. She selected the
district for the field of her efforts, because it was the common
property of the nation, and because the laws of the district gave her
the right to educate _free_ Colored children, and she attempted to
teach none others. She opened her plan to many of the leading friends
of freedom, in an extensive correspondence, but found especially, at
this time, a wise and warm encourager and counsellor in her scheme, in
William R. Smith, a Friend, of Farmington, near Rochester, New York,
in whose family she was now a private teacher. Her correspondents
gen