gland hills, and developed a strength of constitution and character which was the basis of her truly beneficent life-work. Refined, sympathetic, and conscientious, with the golden rule for her text, her career was ever marked with deeds of kindness and charity to the oppressed of every class. Taking an active part in both the "Anti-slavery" and "Woman's Rights" struggles, she early learned the very alphabet of liberty. With her the perception of its blessings and its glory was also a rich inheritance, and the vigilance and courage to conquer and secure it for others was not less a noble legacy. The love of liberty flowed down to her through two streams of life. On the mother's side she was descended from Peter Waldo,[1] after whom the Waldenses were named; and on the father's, from Peregrine White, who was born in Massachusetts in 1620, the first child of Pilgrim parents. It is not strange she was by temperament and constitution a reformer, and a protestant against all despotisms, whether of mind, body, or estate. In the agitation for human rights of one class after another, in their historical order, she enlisted with the Abolitionists, with the Woman Suffragists, with the Loyal League and sanitary workers, and after the war, in relief of the Freedmen. Her interest in her own sex began early, and continued to the last.
At the age of twenty-two she married, and about the year 1842 removed with her family to Ohio, where her home soon became the refuge of the fugitive slave, and the resting-place of his defenders. In 1849 she began, with her husband, Chas. S. S. Griffing, her public labors in connection with the "American" and the "Western Anti-Slavery Societies," speaking at first to small audiences in school-houses, and when prejudice and bitterness gave way, to conventions, and mass-meetings; opposition and curiosity yielding finally to sympathy and aid. But for years the meetings were often broken up by mobs. The effort to uproot slavery was pronounced either absurd, treasonable, or irreligious; that it would incite insurrection of the slaves; or if successful, bring great responsibility upon the Abolitionists, and disaster to the whole country.
In 1861, Mrs. Griffing, prompted by the same loyal spirit that moved all the women of the nation, turned from the ordinary occu-
- ↑ Peter Waldo, a merchant of Lyon, of the 12th century, was less the founder of a sect, than the representative and leader of a wide-spread struggle against the corruptions of the clergy. The church would have tolerated him, had he not trenched upon ground dangerous to the hierarchy. But he had the four Gospels translated and (like Wicklyffe) maintained that laymen had the right to read them to the people. He exposed thus the ignorance and the immorality of the clergy, and brought down their wrath upon himself. His opinions were condemned by a General Council, and he retired to the valleys of the Cottian Alps. Long persecutions followed, but his disciples could not be forced to yield their opinions. The protest of the Waldenses related to practical questions.—Encyc.
