Amy Cassey
Born in New York City in 1809 to Sarah and Rev. Peter H. Williams Jr., a leading Episcopalian minister, Amy Matilda Williams married Philadelphia businessman Joseph Cassey, a gentleman twenty years her senior in 1826. At the time she was only 17 years old. She was an early and active participant in the Antislavery Conventions of American Women (1837). As the household always employed at least one servant, Amy was free to devote considerable attention to the anti-slavery effort, including being active in the interracial Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.
Amy’s personal album resides in the collection at the Library Company of Philadelphia and contains original drawings and writings by Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Sarah Mapps Douglass, and members of James Forten’s family, to name a few.
Six of her eight children survived infancy. When Joseph Cassey died in 1848, Amy remarried two years later to Charles Lenox Remond and moved to Salem, Massachusetts, where she continued her work in abolition and civil rights. The days and hours leading to her death due to illness in 1856 are captured in the diary of young Charlotte Forten.
Read more about this topic: The Cassey House