The Lucy I am writing about is Lucy Colman – one of the great heroines of the 19th Century, who has been all but forgotten in our time.  This must be remedied, as Lucy was one of the most forward-looking women of that age in her views on civil rights.  One hundred years passed from the time Lucy began advocating school integration before it became law; seventy years passed before women were considered citizens, and some of Lucy’s causes have yet to be realized as public opinion slowly advances to her level of social consciousness. 
 

Lucy Danforth was born in Sturbridge, Massachusetts on 26 July, 1817.  Even in her youth, Lucy questioned the religion she was taught, asking her mother why, if god was good, he caused little children to be born into slavery.  The only thing she could imagine worse than slavery was burning forever in a pit of fire in hell.  She was told to read her bible for clarification, but only found confusion.  She turned to her aunt, who by this time had taken over the role of parent after the death of Lucy’s mother, and asked why it was that the god of the bible “used such filthy words, and what was the good of such laws, and why woman was required to do things that were wrong in the nature of things.”¹ Her aunt told her, “I don’t know; put away the bible till you are older; read the Psalms and the New Testament.” 

From 1824 to 1830, a revival of Calvinistic religion swept over New England, with its doctrine of predestination which included believing that some men and women were “saved” from birth while others were condemned.  Lucy was puzzled to understand the benefit of such a revival if human beings were “elected” to be saved from birth; for how could a person’s repentance matter if it was predetermined that they were to burn in hell? 

Lucy observed the religious bodies of her community for a clue as to their divine calling, but found that the Presbyterians hated the Unitarians, Methodists hated the Episcopalians, and all hated the Universalists. 

The Universalists, she learned, taught that with Jesus’ death, all the debts of sin were paid and all people would go to heaven upon death. For this, the other religious organizations called them Infidels, for what was religion without a burning hell and a devil?  Lucy, being in her teens at the time, was so happy to find a religion that did not send the majority of people to a fate of fire that she enthusiastically joined the Universalists.² 

In 1835, at eighteen, Lucy married another Universalist, John Davis,³ and moved to Boston, Massachusetts.  Lucy finally had the opportunity to expand her intellect in the new environment.  It was not long, however, before her husband contracted consumption and, after four years with the disease, he died in 1841, leaving her a widow at the age of twenty-four. 

In 1843 she married again, becoming Lucy Colman, and her only child, Gertrude, was born in 1845.  Lucy did not realize the full extent of woman’s legal slavery to men, for her husband, in his kindness to her, did not enforce his lawful rights with her. As she began to study and learn the laws involving wives’ slavery to husbands, she could not help but compare their constricted rights with those of the slave. 

She puzzled over what she personally could do to help both women and slaves, for she knew that society was taught by the churches that women were not to speak in public, but to go to their husbands with any questions they might have, and so she felt that society would not allow her to speak against slavery by sex and race.  Still, she was determined, and in 1846 she began her career of work for the emancipation of slavery in all its forms. 

In 1852, when Lucy was 35, her husband, an employee of the railroad company, was killed in an accident.  Of the funeral, Lucy reported, “I was at that time a Spiritualist.  I had given up the Church, more because of its complicity with slavery than from a full understanding of the foolishness of its creed.  The Universalist and the Unitarian churches were offered for the funeral, but I did not accept their use.  I was no longer in sympathy with them.”⁴  

After Lucy was turned away from employment at the railroad company, the post office, and a printing company – simply because she was a woman – she turned to teaching to earn a living for herself and her young daughter.  She received $350 a year for the same position in which a man received $800 a year. When she was offered the “colored school” in Rochester, New York, she accepted the position, with a private agenda of closing down the school. 

Lucy was a fighter for the emancipation of the slave, and hated discrimination of any kind. The thought that little, innocent children were being discriminated against through segregation was repugnant to her.  She encouraged the parents to remove their children from her school and enroll them in their own district schools, and within one year she had succeeded in her goals and the school ceased to exist.  The school suffered a quiet death, with no newspaper reports recording its demise – which was perhaps fortunate to prevent a social outcry against her efforts.  Unfortunately, she had destroyed her own job in the meantime – although to one of Lucy’s mental commitment to equality, this was the price that she had no choice but to pay. 

While teaching at the colored school, Susan B. Anthony (who at the time was working as a teacher rather than full-time for women’s rights) had obtained permission for a woman to present an essay at the State Convention of Teachers in New York.  She asked Lucy to prepare the paper to read, knowing Lucy had caused a stir in her local Teacher’s meetings by opposing corporal punishment and urging the cessation of use of the whip on children.  Although afraid of speaking in public, Lucy read her paper, and it caused a huge sensation. 

In the paper, Lucy urged the abolition of corporal punishment in the schools, and influenced many to discuss the subject. One teacher, a minister, asked, “What will you do with the words of the wisest man, Solomon, ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’?”⁵ She told him that the civilization of the 19th century had outgrown Solomon. She was met with complete, stunned silence. Then the hisses came, and the shouts of “She is an Infidel!”  A member of the audience accused her of trying to take away the bible, to which Lucy replied, “If your Bible is a bundle of rods, or a license for adultery, the loss of it will be a blessing.”⁶  

Although Lucy had been nervous at the thought of public speaking, she was so angered at the comments of the audience that she forgot her fears.  When the audience insisted on questioning her views of the bible, Lucy asked if it would not be better to discuss the theme of her paper rather than the author’s religious beliefs. So intense was the discussion that the meeting continued until 11 o’clock that night. 

Lucy’s “punishment” for her speech was to be placed in the most difficult school in Rochester, consisting of a class of all nationalities in a small classroom.  Included were two assistants, each with a whip in hand to correct the students.  The first thing Lucy did was to take the whips away from the assistants, with the explanation that as senior teacher, she would do any whipping that needed to be done. Of course she did not use the whip, and had no trouble in managing the children, but the whip was not abolished in the other classrooms. 

Despite Lucy’s success in controlling her students without the use of the whip, she remained the only outspoken champion for the abolition of corporal punishment in the New York state public schools until the Rev.  Samuel J. May, a liberal, became chairman of the Syracuse Board of Education and abolished the use of the whip in that district. Mr. May, a Unitarian, believed in equal rights for the sexes and races. 

Lucy found the wide difference in salary between what she received and what male teachers received intolerable, and she determined to leave Rochester.  This was not a difficult decision, as, because of her efforts and reputation, she was not popular with the other teachers and administrators. 

Her efforts and experiences made Lucy all the more determined to work for the emancipation of the slave, and after the closing of the colored school she decided to devote herself full-time to work in the cause of the abolition of slavery. To facilitate this new career, she asked her father and aunt to live with her, knowing that her aunt would watch Gertrude while Lucy worked. 

Her first lecture was delivered in a Presbyterian church near Rochester, and was pronounced a success.  At this time, Lucy was a member of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, and was sent by them to Boston with their contribution for the annual fair to be held to raise money for their cause. Lucy, a rebel in many ways, was, at this time, wearing the bloomer fashion, that is, a dress falling a little below the knee with pantalets made of the same material.  After dropping off her goods at the Boston fair, Lucy was returning to her place of temporary residence escorted by Mr. Charles Remond, a famous African-American orator and abolitionist. Passing the Old North Church just as the parishioners were exiting, Lucy found, much to her amusement, that the “holy people” who were told to “love thy neighbor,” began raising such shouts against her dress, and her activity of walking with a black man, that it was “as though the ‘fabled pandemonium’ had broken loose.”⁷  

She and her good friend Amy Post attended the annual convention of the Western Anti-Slavery Society in Michigan, staying with an African-American family who were, at that time, also entertaining three  escaped slaves. 

Although Lucy and Amy were both Spiritualists as this time, they were dismayed at the Convention to find that the talk kept returning to spirits, and how the spirits would soon emancipate the slaves.  Lucy and Amy found this too much like the Christian sects who promised god would emancipate the slaves, and refused to make a human effort in that direction. Luckily, however, Lucy and Amy became acquainted with the Infidel Henry De Garmo, who introduced them to the Boston Investigator and The Liberator,  much to their delight. They also met Marius Robinson, the editor of the Antislavery Bugle who had been set upon by a mob, tarred and feathered, and left to die for speaking on abolition in Ohio. This little group returned to the convention determined to return its focus to abolition rather than Spiritualism, and thus Lucy found another source of enemies in her growing list of those opposing her viewpoints - the Spiritualists. 

As a result of her efforts during the Convention, however, Lucy was appointed an accredited agent by the Western Anti-Slavery Society, but had to pay her own expenses and make her own salary through passing the hat at speeches.  She did so well that the American Anti-Slavery Society, headquartered in Boston, asked her to work for them, and paid her a small salary, as well as her expenses.  Lucy traveled to places no other speaker would go and, when the collection plate was low, went without eating or heat. 

Lucy went on to lecture in various towns in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New York. Speeches by abolitionists at this time were frequently rowdy occasions, and Lucy endured the malicious misrepresentation of her statements in the press, as well as the heckling of the crowds to deliver her message of the equality of all people. 

Lucy reported that everywhere she traveled, it seemed that the ringleaders of the groups who attacked the abolitionists were ministers.⁸ Still, Lucy proudly declared that she had “seen a number of mobs, [and] have been honored by being mobbed for the slaves’ sake three separate times.”  She wrote, “A religion that has a personal God, outside of humanity, to worship and to please, is quite apt to get appointed an official to regulate the people, and particularly to execute punishment adequate to the offense committed against an Infinite Ruler of the universe. Humanity so likes authority, it seems sometimes as if it gloated upon the sufferings of its fellows.”⁹  

Lucy faced the double ignominy of not only being an abolitionist, but a woman.  At one time, to discredit her, a minister spread the rumor that she had been seen with single man under a bedcloth twice. Lucy forced the man to appear with her before an audience to explain that she and the single man had been in a wagon on their way to a speech at the time, and the bedcloth, a quilt belonging to the family where Lucy was staying, had been over their legs as a means of keeping off the chill air. The minister was properly chagrined and tried to explain he had meant his accusation only as a joke. 

At another time, a minister rose after one of Lucy’s speeches to say that Lucy must have weak morals, for she ignored the commands of the bible by uncovering her head and speaking in public. Lucy asked her attacker if he considered himself a good Christian, to which he indignantly replied “Of course I do. I am a Christian, and I do not wish to be insulted by such a question.” Lucy replied, “No insult was intended, sir. I knew you were a very ignorant man, but I did suppose you knew something of the Bible laws in reference to your own sex, as you were so familiar with the laws by which I should be governed. You come into a meeting of mine, and insult me with your charges, with your face as smooth as a woman’s; and your Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not mar the corners of thy beard’ - you have cut yours all off.” When the man vehemently denied any such passage being in the bible, Lucy opened the book and read the command to the audience, and thus another heckler was silenced. 

Lucy later wrote, “Once engage in the dirty work of injuring one who does not believe in your creed, and the work grows apace; and worse than all else, such persons come to think they are really doing God a service for which they shall merit and obtain a high seat in heaven.”¹⁰  

In 1862, her daughter, Gertrude, now seventeen, entered the New England Woman’s Medical College.  Within three weeks she was dead of one of the many ailments which at the time made life so precarious. The funeral services were performed by Frederick Douglass and, although Lucy did not want a minister included, a friend of the family who was a Universalist minister, did say a few words. 

Having lost two husbands and now her only child, Lucy fell into a depression in which she simply wanted to die. A friend told her about a position in Washington, D.C., as matron in the National Colored Orphan Asylum, thinking that once Lucy learned of the conditions there, she would put aside her personal grief in indignation to help the young residents contained therein. 

Lucy went to Washington and found that the poor little homeless children were under the rule of a woman teacher who deliberately starved and abused them, and Lucy resolved to end the woman’s reign at the Asylum.  This teacher was so popular with the directors of the Asylum that any complaint by a matron against her had resulted in the dismissal of the matron. 

Lucy found that of the eighty children housed in the Asylum, ninety percent were ill, and all were infested with lice. She told the teacher that although she might control the children in the classroom, Lucy would rule outside of it.  When the teacher forbade the children to eat from the fruit trees outside the Asylum walls, Lucy told them to eat any fruit which had fallen to the ground. 

Enlisting the help of a friendly army surgeon, Lucy worked to restore the children’s health. Harriet Tubman also helped rid the Asylum of filth; but sickness, starvation and parasites took many of the children’s lives before all the changes could be made. Lucy finally convinced the directors of the home to discharge the teacher responsible for the condition of the children. 

Lucy next became a teacher in another “colored school” in Georgetown, and went on to become Superintendent of all the schools in the district. In this role, she conscientiously visited each school every week, preaching cleanliness in place of the verbal pleadings and prayers which would avail them nothing. 

“Mr. Lincoln was not himself with this colored woman; he had no funny story for her, he called her aunty, as he would his washerwoman, and when she complimented him as the first Antislavery President, he said, ‘I’m not an Abolitionist; I wouldn’t free the slaves if I could save the Union in any other way - I’m obliged to do it.”

Lucy was also very involved in the Freedman’s Village in Washington, of which her friend, Captain Carse, was Superintendent. The American Tract Society, a group distributing religious tracts, were prominent at the Village, although Lucy noted that previous to the Civil War they had avoided any mention of the sins of slavery. They opposed Lucy’s involvement in the Village because of her reputation as an Infidel; but Captain Carse, who felt Lucy was a good influence on the newly freed slaves, was able to circumvent their efforts to keep her out, and she worked with the residents, teaching them health care. In addition to working in the Orphan Asylum and Freedman’s Village, Lucy also worked extensively in the hospitals, soothing the soldiers. 

At this time, Sojourner Truth, that famous black freedom-fighter, was a resident of the Village. Her one great wish was to meet the Abolition president, Abraham Lincoln.  She supposed that she could simply walk into the White House and make his acquaintance, but found it was not that easy. So she asked Lucy for help in securing an interview. Lucy knew Mrs. Lincoln’s dressmaker, who was black, and was able to obtain an appointment for eight o’clock one Saturday morning. The two women arrived promptly at eight o’clock, only to wait until 11:30 before their names were called to see the president. While they were waiting, another black woman had entered the waiting room, and asked if she might accompany Sojourner and Lucy to see Lincoln, as she a had very pressing reason to speak to him. 

Even after being admitted to Lincoln’s office, however, the women had to wait while he told one of his funny stories to a group of business men there to request the release of one of their kind charged with trading with the rebels.  Once they left, Lucy introduced Sojourner to the President, but “Mr. Lincoln was not himself with this colored woman; he had no funny story for her, he called her aunty, as he would his washerwoman, and when she complimented him as the first Antislavery President, he said, ‘I’m not an Abolitionist; I wouldn’t free the slaves if I could save the Union in any other way - I’m obliged to do it.”¹¹ Lucy, insulted for Sojourner, told the women they should take their leave, but the President called her, and her alone, back and asked her to take a seat. 

Lucy commenced reading the letter the woman she had met in the waiting room had given her, concerning her husband, who was a soldier fighting for the union.  Although he had served at the front for eleven months, he had not yet received any pay (and to Lucy’s chagrin she found that as a black soldier, he was paid the measly sum of seven dollars a month), and the family was destitute.  The woman was pleading for help.  According to Lucy, Lincoln said, “ ‘Tis a hard case, but what can I do?  I have no more money than she has. Can’t you take her off my hands?” 

“Mr. President,” Lucy replied, “if you will put upon this envelope the words you have just repeated to me, ‘I think this a hard case, but what can I do?  I have no more money than she has,’ signing your name as the President of the United States, I will gladly relieve you of this woman.”  Lincoln at once saw his inconsistency and wrote on the envelope, “I think this is a worthy object. - Abe Lincoln.” 

It was evident to Lucy during her interview with Mr. Lincoln that at this time he was not happy that circumstances had made him the emancipator of the slave and that he believed in the white race as being superior. 

When Lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson became President, Sojourner returned to Lucy to obtain her influence in meeting the President. What a different reception they had with President Johnson!  Johnson called Sojourner Mrs. Truth, asked her to be seated, and refused to sit down himself while she was standing. Throughout their interview, President Johnson accorded Sojourner, as well as Lucy, every courtesy. 

Through study and experience, Lucy realized that Spiritualism was as false as any of the more orthodox creeds, and abandoned it, becoming a “complete Agnostic.”¹² Lucy was a consistent attendant of Freethought conventions, being interested not only in sexual and racial slavery, but to mental slavery. She supported any reform that might help advance humanity.¹³ She wrote for the Boston Investigator and The Truth Seeker, as well as for other freethought publications.¹⁴  

Her efforts for freedom for women included many daring acts, including “making it my business” to walk the streets alone at night after the Chief of Police had forbidden the act to women only. She complained when she was not arrested, reporting that “as men make the laws, I should not complain if they make them of such character as shall confine them to the house in all hours necessary for their good behavior.”¹⁵  

Lucy was elected chairperson three times of the Radical Club, comprised mainly of working class Freethinkers and organized by H.L. Green.  After serving in that position for two years, she contracted smallpox and was confined to the house for several months in 1875. Without her leadership, the Club disintegrated. 

In 1878 she, along with her sister, Dr. Raymond, began a freethought group, calling it the “J. Stuart Mill League of Syracuse,” with twenty-two members.  Shortly thereafter, Dr. Raymond, the last of Lucy’s four sisters, died. 

After losing the last member of her family, Lucy thought of D.M. Bennett, editor of The Truth Seeker, and his family as her own. In 1878, Bennett, W.S. Bell, and Josephine Tilton were arrested for selling “obscene literature,” which at the time was anything concerning human reproduction. Josephine’s crime was that she had brought and sold six hundred copies of the controversial book, Cupid’s Yokes, to a meeting of the New York State Freethinkers Association. Josephine’s mother, Lucy M. Tilton, was a friend to Lucy and a fellow abolitionist. When she was offered bail, Josephine at first refused, but finally accepted it from Lucy. Lucy wrote of the ordeal, “My life has been a busy one, and I am tired through and through. I hoped my public work was done, but ...these arrests, one of them of my own sex, have so stirred the dying embers into life that by the force of their heat I am impelled again into the field in opposition to tyranny in this new form...”¹⁶ Bennett and Bell were also bailed out of jail, and although the three were brought to court in 1878, the case was postponed and never brought to trial.¹⁷  

When Bennett was arrested and later imprisoned in 1879 after being entrapped by the infamous fighter against freedom, Anthony Comstock, for selling so-called “pornographic” materials, Lucy did all in her power to help him. She wrote letters for publication encouraging donations to his Defense Fund. Calling him “a man who wields a mighty influence for freedom and justice, and against superstition and tyranny,” who has “declared for freethought, free speech, and free mails,”¹⁸ she compared him to William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist whom she had seen flee to the Boston jail to hide from a mob determined to kill him for speaking against slavery. Like Garrison and Abner Kneeland, another victim of the blasphemy laws, she reported that Bennett’s imprisonment made her blood kindle.¹⁹  

This did not interfere with her woman’s rights activities. In 1878, Lucy was on the executive committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), and was appointed to the Committee on Resolutions when the group met for it’s annual convention.  When two of the resolutions were challenged by her old friend and colleague Frederick Douglass, Lucy did not allow friendship to stand in the way of principle.  The resolutions read: 

Ninth - Resolved, That as the duty of every individual is self-development, the lessons of self-sacrifice and obedience taught women by the Christian church have been fatal not only to her own highest interests, but through her have also dwarfed and degraded the race. 

Tenth - Resolved, That the fundamental principle of the Protestant reformation, the right of individual conscience and judgment in the interpretation of scripture, heretofore conceded to and exercised by man alone, should now be claimed by woman, and that in her most vital interests she should not longer trust authority, but be guided by her own reason. 

Resolved, That it is through the perversion of the religious element in woman, cultivating the emotions at the expense of her reason, playing upon her hopes and fears of the future, holding this life with all its high duties forever in abeyance to that which is to come, that she, and the children she has trained, have been so completely subjugated by priestcraft and superstition.

Lucy stood and announced that she wished to preach a short sermon, and her text would be “Frederick Douglass on Self-Sacrifice.”  She asked why, if self-sacrifice was so wonderful, Douglass had not sacrificed himself for the American Union? 

Douglass replied that he had two sons in the Union army and would have been there himself but they would not have him. Lucy replied that she was not talking about the war, but rather his slavery. If self-sacrifice - the putting aside of one’s own needs and desires - was so wonderful, why did he not practice this kind of humility by remaining a slave? Douglass did not respond. The resolution was adopted without amendment.²⁰  

“The Christian church, with its religion, seems to me a blot upon civilization.”

Lucy continued her activities with Freethought, serving as a vice president of the American Secular Union (at least in 1890).²¹ In 1889, she was asked by The Truth Seeker which she found more dangerous, the Roman Catholic Church or the National Reform Association, a group composed of Protestants who were trying to rewrite the Constitution to include references to God and Jesus Christ and were promoting many other intrusions of religion into government as well. Lucy answered “I do not know which is the more dangerous to liberty – Romanism or Protestantism. Either is fatal if it predominates. Parochial schools are a menace, and the Bible in schools is an insult. Our Sunday-schools are very mischievous. Which is most to be feared I cannot tell. We need to use great diligence as Freethinkers lest we find ourselves imprisoned or even executed for expression of opinion.” To the question, “What is your opinion of the Christian religion and the Christian church?” Lucy replied, “I wish to be just to all, but the Christian church, with its religion, seems to me a blot upon civilization.”²²  

Later, she elaborated on her thoughts, writing “...the Protestant religion, in all its different creeds, is a mild mixture compared to what it was seventy years ago. And perhaps for the reason that its hideousness is so nicely covered, there is more need that Liberals be on the alert.  Christianity is the more dangerous when it gives its attention to this life.  Christianity demands entire subordination to its edicts, no matter that it keeps out of sight the damnation of infants in another world, if it subjugates all children to its decrees by teaching them, not only in Sunday-schools but in public schools supported by the public at large, the doctrines taught in the Bible. Until the majority of the people are emancipated from authority over their minds, we are not safe.”²³  

Charles C. Moore, editor of The Blue Grass Blade, wrote of her, “For years hers was a familiar face and figure at each of the Freethought conventions, no matter where held, or the distance that had to be traveled.  Like a Queen she came, proud of her position and happy in her thought, contented in her association with kindred hearts and minds. Liberty was her one watch-word, whether of body or mind, and her only prayer was the spring of human love... In the course of time, by actual experience, aided by reading and study, Mrs. Colman became a radical Freethinker.  She was a faithful and constant attendant at each and all Freethought conventions, whereat the writer of this sketch first met her and became acquainted with her.  She became equally opposed to white slavery as to black slavery, and above all to mental slavery. She became interested in every living movement for progress, reform and human advancement.  She became an ardent advocate of the rights of both men and women. She has mingled with the world, ever and always presenting a character as spotless and as stainless as the polar snows. She met and mingled with the greatest men and women of the Nation, and took part in each and every movement for reform.”²⁴  

In 1891, at the age of 74, Lucy wrote her Reminiscences, the fascinating record of her life. 

After a life filled with great heights and great depths, and devoted to the cause of obtaining equal rights for all, regardless of race, sex, or age, this great lady, Lucy Colman, went to her rest at her home in Syracuse, New York, on January 18, 1906, at the age of 88.²⁵ May her memory live on as an inspiration to us all!  

Footnotes: 

¹ Reminiscences, Lucy N. Colman, H. L. Green, Pub., Buffalo, N.Y., 1891, p. 6.  

² A Woman of the Century, 1470 Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life, Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, Charles Wells Moulton Pub., 1893, republished by Gale Research Company, Book Tower, Detroit, 1967, p. 196.  

³ 400 Years of Freethought, Samuel Porter Putnam, The Truth Seeker Company, N. Y., 1894, pp. 709-710.  

⁴ Reminiscences, p. 13.  

⁵ Reminiscences, p. 17.  

⁶ Reminiscences, p. 18.  

⁷ "An Anti-Slavery Reminiscence," Lucy Colman, Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, Third Series,Vol. V., No. 33, Whole No. 880, 8/31/1901, p. 258.  

⁸ 400 Years of Freethought, pp. 709-710.  

⁹ Reminiscences, p. 54.  

¹⁰ Reminiscences, p. 22.  

¹¹ Reminiscences, p. 67.  

¹² A Rationalist Encyclopedia, Joseph McCabe, London, Watts & Co., 1950, p. 107.  

¹³ The Blue Grass Blade, April 10, 1909.  

¹⁴ A Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of All Ages and Nations, J.M. Wheeler, Progressive Pub. Co., 1889, p. 84.  

¹⁵ "A Veteran Once More in the Field -- A Letter from Lucy Colman," The Truth Seeker, October 12, 1878.  

¹⁶ "A Veteran Once More in the Field -- A Letter from Lucy Colman,"  

¹⁷ Fifty Years of Freethought, Volume I, George E. Macdonald, The Truth Seeker Company, New York, 1929, pp. 228-229.  

¹⁸ The Truth Seeker, June 21, 1879.  

¹⁹ "A Veteran Once More in the Field -- A Letter from Lucy Colman,"  

²⁰ The National Citizen and Ballot Box, Vol. 3, No. 5, August, 1878, p.1.  

²¹ The Ironclad Age, Vol 35, No. 26, 9/6/1890.  

²² The Truth Seeker Annual and Freethinkers' Almanac, New York, Truth Seeker Office, 1889.  

²³ Reminiscences, P. 7.  

²⁴ The Blue Grass Blade, April 10, 1909.  

²⁵ Fifty Years of Freethought, Vol. II, George E. Macdonald, The Truth Seeker Company, New York, 1931, p. 282.  

Carole Gray is an Atheist freelance writer who lives in Columbus, Ohio. she is the author of a magisterial book, yet unpublished, on the history of Atheism, Nineteenth Century American women of Free Thought. She also is the author of a number of Atheist-Freethought calendars. This article is an excerpt from her book.