Delia Webster, Petticoat Abolitionist

Cincinnati, OH

In the 1830s and 40s, Cincinnati sat on the Ohio River just across from the slave state of Kentucky, making it a charged crossroads where the realities of American slavery were impossible to ignore. It was here, during her years living in the city, that Harriet Beecher Stowe witnessed the human toll of bondage firsthand and endured personal grief that deepened her moral conviction. Those experiences fueled Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), a novel that put the cruelty of slavery before a national audience and helped harden Northern opposition in the decade before the Civil War.

Lexington, KY

Led by Mrs. E. Belle Mitchell Jackson, the Colored Orphan Industrial Home opened in Lexington in 1894 to shelter Black orphans and youth, who learned to read and write and acquired a trade, and it also gave refuge to elderly women. By 1909 the home had grown to 18 acres and two brick houses; after a fire in 1912, a new building was dedicated in 1913. That structure now serves as the Robert H. Williams Cultural Center.

Bedford, KY

Erected around 1850 on the site of an earlier lockup and given a second story in 1899, this Bedford stone jail stood as a symbol of law and order for some 133 years, until 1983. Its most famous prisoner was ardent abolitionist Delia Webster, briefly held here in 1854 for her antislavery activity. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Oldham County, KY

The Westport courthouse, where Oldham County's first court sat in 1828, was as much an instrument of slavery as of ordinary justice, ruling on the sales, hire-outs, and escapes of enslaved people alongside its other business. One case charged Justice of the Peace William Gatewood with illegally hiring out Mahala, whose daughter Malinda was the wife of Henry Bibb—the man Gatewood enslaved. Bibb escaped, became a celebrated abolitionist, and founded a colony in Canada for fugitive slaves; the court itself moved to LaGrange in 1838.