Sattira Douglas

Sattira 'Sattie' Douglas (c. 1840 - ?) was an American abolitionist and educator. An African American organizer, she helped form and lead multiple committees and clubs in Chicago and the West.[1] Douglas traveled to Kansas near the end of the American Civil War, where she took up teaching freedmen and women, who had recently escaped slavery.

Early and personal life

Douglas was born in 1840 to free African Americans Alfred and Maria Steele, whose middle-class status enabled them to give her a good education.[2] teenager Douglas showed early interest in abolitionism and would collect the Canadian newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, which was edited by Mary Ann Shadd and abolitionist H. Ford Douglas, who she eventually married in 1857.[3] The two would remain married until his death in 1865 from malaria.[3]

Civil War

Douglas was a staunch supporter of black participation for the North in the Civil War and her husband H. Ford served in the 95th Illinois Regiment.[4][5] She frequently wrote to newspapers such as the Christian Recorder and Weekly Anglo-African, arguing that the Civil War could advance equal rights and that a lack of participation would "prove the correctness of the aspersion indulged in by our enemies, that we are unworthy of those rights which they have so long witheld from us."[6] Douglas also traveled with fellow abolitionists and Civil War proponents Mary Ann Shadd and Frances Harper, among others, to encourage enlistment and to also raise funds for black Canadian settlements.[7]

Douglas was a key organizer and founder of the Colored Soldier’s Aid Society of Chicago and was the secretary of the Colored Ladies Freedmen’s Aid Society of Chicago.[8] Douglas was noted as being treasurer and helping to secure financial aid for the CFLAS. With the help of the CFLAS, she was able to depart to teach in Kansas in 1864.[9]

Life In Kansas

In Kansas, Douglas was a school teacher, teaching freed slaves of the area, who were referred to as "contrabands". She would send back reports of her work to the Weekly Anglo-African and continued to work closely with the CFLAS to provide aid to the freed people.[2]

Further reading
  • Jeffrey, Julie Roy. The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

See also

References
  1. Karamanski, Theodore J.; McMahon, Eileen M. (2014-07-01). Civil War Chicago: Eyewitness to History. Ohio University Press. p. 230. ISBN 9780821444818.
  2. Jeffrey, Julie (1998). The Great Silent Army: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. Chapel Hill: University of Carolina. pp. 216, 217–218. ISBN 978-0-8078-2436-8.
  3. Cunningham, Roger D., "Douglas's Battery at Fort Leavenworth: The Issue of Black Officers During the Civil War," Kansas History23, no. 4 (2000): 201.
  4. Logan, Shirley Wilson (2008-09-11). Liberating Language: Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America. SIU Press. p. 21. ISBN 9780809387120.
  5. Harbour (2015). ""I Earn By My Own Labor From Day To Day:" African American Women's Activism in the Wartime Midwest". Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. 108 (3–4): 347–373. doi:10.5406/jillistathistsoc.108.3-4.0347. ISSN 1522-1067.
  6. Ripley, C. Peter (2000-11-09). The Black Abolitionist Papers: Vol. V: The United States, 1859-1865. UNC Press. pp. 212–213. ISBN 9780807864432.
  7. Ripley, C. Peter (1991). The Black Abolitionist Papers: The United States, 1830-1846. University of North Carolina Press. p. 62. ISBN 9780807819265.
  8. Forbes, Ella (1998). African American Women During the Civil War. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. p. 197. ISBN 978-0-8153-3115-5.
  9. Forbes, Ella (1998). African American Women During the Civil War. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. pp. 45, 73. ISBN 978-0-8153-3115-5.
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