Lucy Col­man Advoc­ated for Abol­i­tion, Suf­frage, and Free­thought

Lucy Col­man Advoc­ated for Abol­i­tion, Suf­frage, and Free­thought

by Laura Nich­ols

(Reprinted from the Democrat and Chronicle, January 18, 2026)

https://www.pressreader.com/usa/democrat-chronicle/20260118/282699053525297

The web­site free­thoughtrail.org says she was born in Stur­bridge, Mas­sachu­setts, in 1817, and worked as a school­teacher. At age 18, she mar­ried John Maubry Davis, and they moved to Boston. He died of con­sump­tion in 1841. Accord­ing to women­his­toryb­log.com, “In 1843, Lucy mar­ried Luther Cole­man (she later changed the spelling of her mar­ried name to Col­man).” They moved to Rochester, and their daugh­ter, Ger­trude, was born about 1845. “Moth­er­hood brought Col­man’s atten­tion to the issue of women’s rights,” the blog says. “She began to ask why mar­ried women and moth­ers had so few rights, and why women were depend­ent on the good­will of their hus­bands for what freedoms they had.” She also befriended Rochester abol­i­tion­ist Amy Post and advoc­ated for eman­cip­a­tion of the slaves. By 1852 she had renounced Chris­tian­ity because of churches’ com­pli­city with slavery.

Cole­man’s hus­band was killed in 1854 while work­ing at the New York Cent­ral Rail­road, which she blamed on the com­pany’s unwill­ing­ness to spend money on repairs. She was hired after­ward as a teacher in a segreg­ated “colored school,” where Col­man met Susan B. Anthony. Accord­ing to the blog, at the state teach­ers con­ven­tion, she spoke out against cor­poral pun­ish­ment in schools, and she and Anthony decried the unequal salar­ies of male and female teach­ers. Dis­gus­ted with segreg­a­tion, Col­man “lob­bied par­ents to with­draw their chil­dren, caus­ing the school to close and los­ing her job in the pro­cess. By 1856, Rochester was provid­ing edu­ca­tion for both white and black chil­dren.”

Between 1856 and 1860, she became an abol­i­tion­ist lec­turer in Ohio, Iowa and Michigan and occa­sion­ally wrote for the anti­s­lavery news­pa­per The Lib­er­ator. She par­ti­cip­ated in an 1858 protest against cap­ital pun­ish­ment led by Anthony and Fre­d­er­ick Dou­glass and in an 1859 peti­tion drive for New York women’s right to vote. In May 1863, Col­man was one of the sec­ret­ar­ies at the Women’s National Loyal League, which con­duc­ted the largest peti­tion drive in U.S. his­tory at that point, with 400,000 sig­na­tures, to pro­mote a con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment to abol­ish slavery. In 1864 and 1865, Col­man worked at a Black orphan asylum in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., and taught and served as a super­in­tend­ent in schools in Wash­ing­ton and Arling­ton, Vir­ginia, to help former slaves. Col­man arranged a meet­ing between Sojourner Truth and Pres­id­ent Abra­ham Lin­coln on Oct. 29, 1864, and accom­pan­ied Truth.

About 1870, Col­man joined her sis­ter in Syra­cuse. “Dur­ing this time, Col­man whole­heartedly embraced free­thought, a philo­soph­ical view­point that opin­ions or beliefs should be based on sci­ence, logic and reason, and should not be derived from reli­gion, author­ity, gov­ern­ment or dogma,” the blog says. She spoke often at con­ven­tions and wrote columns for a free­thought journal as well as writ­ing her mem­oir.