Draft:Julia Williams Garnet

Julia Ward Williams Garnet (1811 – 1870) was an African-American abolitionist.

Education
She was born Julia Ward Williams in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1811, and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. She had two younger sisters, Ann and Diana.

Her early life was characterized by determination to complete her education in the fact of opposition. She attended the Canterbury Female Seminary run by Prudence Crandall in Canterbury, Connecticut, until it had to close in 1834 after repeated attempts to destroy it.

She studied at the Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire, until it was destroyed by a mob in 1835, and finished her education at the Oneida Institute in New York.

Abolition and relief work
After graduating, Julia taught at an elementary school in Boston, where she was a member of the Massachusetts Female Emancipation Society.

In 1837 she went as a delegate to the Annual Women’s Anti-Slavery Convention in New York City. There she was visited by Henry Highland Garnet, who had been her classmate at the Noyes Academy, and who said of her: 'O what [a] lovely being she is! Most susceptible and chaste. She seems to have everything which beautifys a female. A good Christian, and a scholar.' They married in 1841, Garnet continuing just as devoted to her, and had three children, one of whom, Mary Garnet Barboza, survived to adulthood.

While Garnet was pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Troy, New York, the pair welcomed people who had escaped from slavery into their church. Julia supported her husband in his ministry, reading and advising on his speeches, running women’s literary associations, teaching Sunday School, and taking over the ministry while he traveled on speaking engagements.

Julia continued her campaigning for abolition in New York, working with the Female Benevolent Society of Troy, and running fundraising bazaars for the anti-slavery newspaper Impartial Citizen.

During the American Civil War, she founded The Ladies’ Committee for the Aid of Sick Soldiers, which supplied 60 soldiers with food.

In 1851, she travelled to London to chair the Free Labor Bazaar at the World Peace Congress.

In 1852, the Garnets moved to Stirling, Jamaica, as missionaries. Julia directed the Female Industrial School there.

In 1858 she learned that her youngest sister Diana and Diana’s daughter Cornelia Read had been enslaved. After a fund-raising effort, Diana and Cornelia were redeemed from slavery by Julia’s brother-in-law, Rev. James Stafford. Cornelia went on to marry Civil War veteran William B. Gould.

On their return to New York, she ran a store and did relief work for those in Washington, D.C. who had been freed by emancipation.

She died in 1870.