1885 MYRTILLA MINER. Memoir of a Pioneer Educator of Freed Black Slaves, Abolitionist, &c.

An excellent memoir of Myrtilla Miner, an influential abolitionist and teacher of free African American women. Like many, she viewed knowledge and education as essential to ending slavery.  

Born in Brookfield, New York, 1815, she became a teacher with early abolitionist sympathies. In 1847, she travelled to Mississippi and taught at the Newton Female Institute in Whitesville.  While teaching there, Miner was appalled by the inhumanity of slavery and asked to teach young African American women, but was forbidden to do so. Because of her sympathy for the slaves, she was finally forced to leave Mississippi.

Returning to New York, she began developing a plan to train African American girls to become teachers for their people. She asked, “can slavery be removed when the free colored man remains degraded?” Frederick Douglass, ever the conservative, considered Miner’s proposal to be risky, stressing “the dangers she would encounter, the hardships she would have to endure and what seemed to me at the time certain failure of the enterprise after all she might do and suffer to make it successful.”

From the beginning of the school, Miner faced “rowdyism and incendiarism.” Much of this harassment targeted the teachers and students. Mobs attempted to burn down Miner’s school. The school met with formal opposition from the white community and city leaders such as former Mayor Walter Lenox. On May 6, 1857, Lenox bitterly denounced Ms. Miner and her school in the National Intelligencer.  Despite a constant barrage of bigotry, harassment, and threats of violence, Miner remained defiant and determined to teach African American girls. In the end, she prevailed. One of her students remarked that she was “one of the bravest women I have ever known.”

​Due to illness, Miner stepped down from teaching in 1857. By then, the Board of Trustees included Samuel Janney, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s husband Calvin Stowe, and her brother Henry Ward Beecher.  In 1861, Miner moved to California in an attempt to improve her health while continuing to raise funds for the school.  Unfortunately, a carriage accident in May 1864 resulted in critical injuries. She died in Washington, DC on December 17, 1864.

Miner, Myrtilla. Myrtilla Miner: A Memoir. Boston and New York. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. 1885. 129pp.

A very good copy, bound in cloth, very solid, with bright and clean pages. Ex library, with spine label and a neat bookplate.Else a very crisp copy.