In her work A Plea for Emigration – or Notes of Canada West (1852), Mary Ann promotes Canada as a destination to anyone looking for “personal freedom and political rights”, which are paramount to her. She does that due to the “absence of condensed information accessible to all”. Although she describes the climate, the culture and the fertile lands of Canada, there is a sense in her writing that they are all possible because of the possibility to be allowed to be free to pursue a life with dignity and to belong in a State that protects you by giving you rights.
In 1853, Mary Ann began publishing her own newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, where she promotes anti-slavery ideas and women’s rights. The United States Presidential Election (1856) is an example. She enumerates the challenges that abolitionists have faced, and, in a prophetic tone, implies that slavery is not going to be solved through politics. She believes that “there is no one so thoroughly depraved as to love violence for its own sake”. However, what should we do when we see it daily? When the oppressor is in power, how are we going to get or protect our rights? Her answer is simple: not “without hard and bloody work”. People did not become abolitionists “from motives of humanity”, according to her, but “from motives of necessity”.
In 1860, The Provincial Freeman closed due to financial pressure. With the beginning of the American Civil War, Mary Ann returned to the United States in 1861 to help recruit soldiers for the Union Army. Years after the war, she enrolls in the first class of Howard University Law School, in Washington, DC, graduating in 1883. She died of a stomach cancer on June 5th, 1893.
Further Reading:
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