Near Kimberton, in Chester county, Pa., was the birth-place, and, till
within a few years, the home of three sisters, Mariann, Grace Anna and
Elizabeth R. Lewis, who were among the most faithful, devoted, and
quietly efficient workers in the Anti-slavery cause, including that
department of it which is the subject of this volume.
Birth-right members of the Society of Friends, they were born into more
than the traditional Anti-slavery faith and feeling of that Society. A
deep abhorrence of slavery, and an earnest will to put that feeling into
act, as opportunity should serve, were in the very life-blood which they
drew from father and mother both.
Left fatherless at an early age, they were taught by their mother to
remember that their father, on his visits to their maternal grandfather,
living then in Maryland, was wont, as he expressed it, to feel the black
shadow of slavery over his spirit, from the time he entered, till he
left, the State; and that, on his death-bed, he had regretted having let
ill-health prevent his meeting with, and joining one of the Anti-slavery
Societies of that day. Of the mother's share in the transmission of
their hereditary feeling, it is enough, to all acquainted with the
history of Anti-slavery work in Pennsylvania, to say that she was
sister, not by blood alone, but in heart and soul, to that early,
active, untiring abolitionist, Dr. Bartholomew Fussell.
It is easy to see that the children of such parents, growing up under
the influence of such a mother, needed no conversion, no sacrifices of
prejudice or hostile opinions, to make them Anti-slavery; but were
ready, simply as a matter of course, to work for the good cause whenever
any way appeared in which their work could serve it. What was called
"modern abolitionism," as distinguished from the less aggressive form of
opposition to slavery, which preceded the movement pioneered by
Garrison, they at once accepted, as soon as it was set before them,
through the agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society, in the campaign
in Pennsylvania, begun in 1836. Regarding it but as the next step
forward in the way they had already entered, they instinctively fell
into line with the new movement, assisted in forming a society auxiliary
to it, in their own neighborhood, and were constant to the end in
working for its advancement.