Josephine Sophia White Griffing

• Josephine Sophie White Griffing
• Born: December 18, 1814
• Died: February 18, 1872

Abolitionist and women’s rights reformer, was born in Hebron, Connecticut, the younger of two children and only daughter of Joseph White Jr., a farmer, mechanic, and member of the Connecticut legislature, and Sophie (Waldo) White, sister of the painter Samuel Lovett Waldo. Joseph White was descended from Peregrine White, the first white child to be born in New England. Sophie White was a descendant of Peter Waldo, founder of the English sect of the Waldenses. When Josephine White was less than a year old, her mother died, and she was raised by her mother’s sister, Mary Waldo, who in time became the second wife of Joseph White. Five more children were added to the family.

Little is known about Josephine White’s early life. In September 1835 she married Charles Stockman Spooner Griffing, a machinist. The couple had five children, all daughters, of whom three lived to adulthood. The Griffings originally settled in Connecticut, but in 1842 they moved to Litchfield, Ohio. There she came under the influence of abolitionist followers of William Lloyd Garrison, who were lecturing in the Midwest, and she and her husband became strong advocates of abolitionism. They opened their home to fugitive slaves and became active participants in the Underground Railroad, helping escaped slaves make their way to Canada. As a member of the board of the Western Anti-Slavery Society and a major contributor to the abolitionist newspaper, The Anti-Slavery Bugle, of Salem, Ohio, Griffing became one of the leading members of the abolitionist movement in the western United States. From 1851 to 1855 she undertook extensive speaking tours in the Midwest for the Western Anti-Slavery Society.

Josephine Griffing did not limit her reforming interests to antislavery. In 1848 she attended pioneer lectures on women’s rights and suffrage, and she was drawn into the new women’s rights movement. She attended the Ohio Woman’s Rights Convention in 1850 and began to lecture on women’s rights as well as on abolition. She was one of the founding members of the Ohio Woman’s Rights Association, serving as its president in 1853. She was also a member of the Woman’s Loyal National League, founded in 1863 by militant feminists, which worked to see that the slave system would be totally ended by the Civil War, serving as the league’s lecturing representative in the Old Northwest. In this capacity she collected thousands of signatures on antislavery petitions that were presented to the U. S. Senate in 1864. In addition, she participated in the temperance movement and joined the Ohio Friends of Human Progress, a radical religious organization that condemned orthodox clergymen for their conservative positions on social issues.

Josephine Griffing was one of the first abolitionists to point out the problems that former slaves would face once they obtained their freedom. In 1863 she moved to Washington, D.C., with her children, having separated from her husband. There she advocated a federally funded program to provide work, education, and housing for freed slaves to prevent pauperism. Griffing became a member of the National Freedman’s Association of the District of Columbia in the spring of 1863, and two years later she headed its program that resettled ex-slaves in the North and provided them with temporary food, housing, and supplies in Washington, D.C. She also established a vocational school to train black women as dressmakers.

Additionally, Griffing lobbied Congress to provide funds for resettlement of former slaves in the North and was one of those responsible for the creation of a Freedmen’s Bureau in March 1865. Although she came to disagree with its autocratic, militaristic bureaucracy, she served as assistant to the Assistant Commissioner for the District of Columbia in 1865 and in 1867 was an employment agent responsible for finding work for freed slaves in northern industrial cities. In this capacity she made contact with private charitable organizations and set up offices in such cities as New York and Providence, Rhode Island. She often accompanied freed blacks from Washington to their new jobs.

When the Freedmen’s Bureau was disbanded in 1869, Griffing, assisted by her eldest daughter, continued working for the District of Columbia’s National Freedman’s Relief Association. She took into her home hundreds of elderly and sick former slaves, and she carried out an extensive campaign to obtain relief funds from local governments, charitable groups, and religious organizations. Griffing was accused of encouraging unemployment and laziness among freed blacks by providing them with welfare, but she felt it was the duty of the country, responsible for past offenses inflicted on blacks by the slave system, to provide a relief system for those unable to work.

After the Civil War Griffing also continued her work for the women’s rights movement. Believing ever more strongly that since uneducated black men had received the vote with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments it was time for white women to have it. She founded the American Equal Rights Association in 1865, serving as its vice president and was president of the Universal Suffrage Association, established in Washington in 1867, helping to lead the suffrage drive in the nation’s capital. In 1869 she joined Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in forming the National Woman Suffrage party, becoming its corresponding secretary.

Griffing’s work on behalf of blacks and women placed a severe strain on her health. She died of consumption at the age of fifty-seven in Washington. She was buried in Burriss Hill Cemetery, Hebron, Connecticut.

Josephine White Griffing’s life was dedicated to the twin causes of abolition and women’s rights. She was one of the few people of her day who saw a need not only to emancipate slaves but to provide government and private help to blacks, assisting them in making the transition from slavery to freedom and full participation in American society.

Josephine Griffing’s papers are located at the Columbia University Library; the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland; the National Archives in Washington, D.C; and Houghton Library, Harvard University. There is no full-length biography, her career must be pieced together from scattered sources. The best modern sketch is to be found in Notable American Women (1971). For her suffrage work, see E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, 6 vols. (1881-1922; reprinted 1969); H. Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1 (1898); and L. B. C. Wyman and A. C. Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chase (1914). For her work in the abolition movement, see G. R. Bentley, A History of the Freedmen’s Bureau (1955) and J. M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality (1964). Also useful is K. E. Melder, “Angel of Mercy in Washington: Josephine Griffing and the Freedmen, 1864-1872,” Columbia Historical Society of Washington, D.C, Records (1963-1965). Obituaries appeared in The Washington Star and The Daily Morning Chronicle, February 19, 1872.