Social reformer, abolitionist, poet, author, suffragist. Born the daughter of a slaveholder, Thomas Griffith and his wife Martha Young, likely sometime in the 1820s, she inherited six slaves when her parents died. She abhored slavery, however, and sought a way to finance her slaves' emancipation and resettlement in the North. Already a published poet as Mattie Griffith, she penned the "Autobiography of a Female Slave," hoping it would advance the abolitionist cause as well as earn enough money to free her slaves. Soon after its publication as an authentic slave biography, however, she revealed that she was the true author. Many alleged slave journals had been published purporting to be actually written by slaves, but what made this work difficult to discredit was the fact that it was written by a southern woman, and a slaveholder, who claimed to have witnessed the horrors recounted in her fictitious biography. It is the only one of its kind still in print today. She was villified in the South and her book condemned. And while it did not earn enough money to help her slaves, the American Anti-Slavery Society financed their freedom and resettlement and brought her into its ranks as a lecturer in the North. She married another prominent abolitionist, the journalist Albert Gallatin Browne, Jr., who was military secretary to Civil War Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew. After the war, she threw herself into the campaign for women's suffrage and was elected vice president of the National Suffrage Association.
Social reformer, abolitionist, poet, author, suffragist. Born the daughter of a slaveholder, Thomas Griffith and his wife Martha Young, likely sometime in the 1820s, she inherited six slaves when her parents died. She abhored slavery, however, and sought a way to finance her slaves' emancipation and resettlement in the North. Already a published poet as Mattie Griffith, she penned the "Autobiography of a Female Slave," hoping it would advance the abolitionist cause as well as earn enough money to free her slaves. Soon after its publication as an authentic slave biography, however, she revealed that she was the true author. Many alleged slave journals had been published purporting to be actually written by slaves, but what made this work difficult to discredit was the fact that it was written by a southern woman, and a slaveholder, who claimed to have witnessed the horrors recounted in her fictitious biography. It is the only one of its kind still in print today. She was villified in the South and her book condemned. And while it did not earn enough money to help her slaves, the American Anti-Slavery Society financed their freedom and resettlement and brought her into its ranks as a lecturer in the North. She married another prominent abolitionist, the journalist Albert Gallatin Browne, Jr., who was military secretary to Civil War Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew. After the war, she threw herself into the campaign for women's suffrage and was elected vice president of the National Suffrage Association.
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