Page:Woman of the Century.djvu/472

Rh Children, from the very beginning of the plans for its establishment, and at the opening, in 1892, she was ready to take a place at its head. There are gathered children from distant mission fields, sent by their parents, that in the home-land they may receive an education removed from the influences of heathen surroundings.

LIVERMORE, Mrs. Mary Ashton Rice, was born in Boston, Mass., 19th December, 1821. Her father, Timothy Rice, who was of Welsh de- scent, served in the United States Navy during the War of 1812-15. Her mother, Zebiah Vose Glover Ashton, born in Boston, was the daughter of Capt. Nathaniel Ashton, of London, Eng. Mrs. Livermore was placed in the public schools of Boston at an early age and was graduated at fourteen, receiving one of the six medals distributed for good scholarship. There were then no high, normal or Latin schools for girls, and their admission to colleges was not even suggested. She was

sent to the female seminary in Charlestown, Mass., now Boston, where she completed the four-year course in two, when she was elected a member of the faculty, as teacher of Latin and French. While teaching, she continued her studies in Latin, Greek and metaphysics under tutors, resigning her position at the close of the second year to take charge of a family school on a plantation in southern Virginia, where she remained nearly three years. As there were between four and five hundred slaves on the estate, Mrs. Livermore was brought face to face with the institution of slavery and witnessed deeds of barbarism as tragic as any described in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." She returned to the North a radical Abolitionist, and thenceforth entered the lists against slavery and every form of oppression. She taught a school of her own in Duxbury, Mass., for the next three years, the ages of her pupils ranging from fourteen to twenty years. It was in reality the high school of the town, and was so counted, when she relinquished it, in 1845, to become the wife of Rev. D. P. Livermore, a Universalist minister settled in Fall River, Mass. The tastes, habits of study and aims of the young couple were similar, and Mrs. Livermore drifted inevitably into literary work. She called the young parishioners of her husband into reading and study clubs, which she conducted, wrote hymns and songs for church hymnals and Sunday-school singing-books, and stories, sketches and poems for the "Galaxy," "Indies' Repository," New York "Tribune " and "National Era." She was identified with the Washingtonian Temperance Reform before her marriage, was on the editorial staff of a juvenile temperance paper, and organized a Cold Water Army of fifteen-hundred boys and girls, for whom she wrote temperance stories which she read to them and which were afterwards published in book form, under the title, "The Children's Army" (Boston, 1844). She wrote two prize stories in 1848, one for a State temperance organization, entitled, "Thirty Years too Late," illustrating the Washingtonian movement, and the other, for a church publishing house, entitled, "A Mental Transformation," elucidating a phase of religious belief. The former was republished in England, where it had a large circulation, has been translated into several languages by missionaries, and was republished in Boston in 1876. In 1857 the Livermores removed to Chicago, III., where Mr. Livermore became proprietor and editor of a weekly religious paper, the organ of the Universalist denomination in the Northwest, and Mrs. Livermore became his associate editor. For the next twelve years her labors were herculean. She wrote for every department of the paper, except the theological, and in her husband's frequent absences from home, necessitated by church work, she had charge of the entire establishment, paper, printing-office and publishing house included. She continued to furnish stories, sketches and letters to eastern periodicals, gave herself to church and Sunday-school work, was untiring in her labors for the Home of the Friendless, assisted in the establishment of the Home for aged Women and the Hospital for Women and Children, and was actively identified with the charitable work of the city She performed much reportorial work in those days, and at the first nomination of Abraham Lincoln for the Presidency, in the Chicago Wigwam in 1860, she was the only woman reporter who had a place among a hundred or more men reporters. All the while she was her own housekeeper, directing her servants herself and giving personal supervision to the education and training of her children. A collection of her stories, written during those busy days, was published under the title, "Pen Pictures " (Chicago, 1S63). The great uprising among men at the opening of the Civil War, in 1861, was paralleled by a similar uprising among women, and in a few months there were hundreds of women's organizations formed throughout the North for the relief of sick and wounded soldiers and the care of soldiers' families. Out of the chaos of benevolent efforts evolved by the times, the United States Sanitary Commission was born. Mrs. Livermore, with her friend, Mrs. Jane C. Hoge, was identified with relief work for the soldiers from the beginning, and at the instance of Rev. Dr. Henry W. Bellows, president of the commission, they were elected associate members of the United States Sanitary Commission, with their headquarters in Chicago, and the two friends worked together till the end of the war. Mrs. Livermore resigned all positions save that on her husband's paper, secured a governess for her children, and subordinated all demands upon her time