Michelle Obama, First Ladies, and African-American History

[Are_grits_groceries]

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The more hidden aspects of African-American history in the White House, however, have to deal with presidential wives and while they did not affect policy as did their husbands, their words and deeds had both a symbolic and tangible power.

Since the Obama Inauguration and continuing with the Lincoln Bicentennial, there's been intense focus on the political strategy of the Great Emancipator to end slavery by signing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. In contrast, one key Lincoln advisor had no ambivalence about abolishing slavery even before it was politically expedient, and saw it first and foremost as an issue of human rights, imploring the president to see it the same way and enlisted nationally-recognized abolitionist leaders like Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner to convince Lincoln to that end. That advisor was -- the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln.

Whatever else might be said about her lavish spending in wartime, her erratic behavior, her faith in spiritualism and mediums, there were few powerful women in mid-19th century America who more vigorously pressed the case first for abolition and then for the education, housing and welfare of freed African-American slaves than did Mrs. Lincoln, daughter of slave-owner, granddaughter of a secret Underground Railroad facilitator.

More than a dozen years before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, the former First Lady Louisa Catherine Adams had passionately enmeshed herself in the abolition of slavery, seeing a direct connection to the limitation of legal rights and property laws that had become institutionalized against women by the 1820's. She circulated abolitionist literature and petitions, aided her husband (then serving in Congress) as he made the case for freedom of those seized from the famous Amistad slave ship, and was a liaison between him and the famous abolitionist Grimke Sisters. Even obscure wives of Presidents who failed to slow slavery made their cases: Abigail Fillmore correctly warned her husband that signing the Fugitive Slave Bill would destroy his career, and Jane Pierce pushed her husband to release abolitionists imprisoned during the "Bloody Kansas" crisis, when they crossed into Kansas-Nebraska territory seeking to prevent slavery from spreading there.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-sferrazza-anthony/michelle-obama-first-ladi_b_170081.html

I am ashamed to say I didn't know about the roles a lot of these First Ladies played. Eleanor Roosevelt is by far the best known, but others tried to make a difference too.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. Thanks for the information

I knew about Mary Todd Lincoln, who hated slavery even as a child in KY (see Gore Vidal's "Lincoln" for a reiteration of the Eliza incident), but didn't know about Mrs. Adams, Filmore, and Pierce.