Louise DeMortie

She has been slighted by historians although she was one of the most important African Americans of her time. "De Mortie's life stands as one of the foundations in which advancements of African Americans was built. Giving up her prosperous and happy life in Boston, she undertook the selfless and difficult task of caring for homeless and indigent children in a southern city that was foreign to her."

Louise De Mortie, born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1833, was well known as a lecturer, reader and persuasive public speaker who first made her mark in the exclusive social circles of Boston, Massachusetts. She was born into a high achieving family of free people of color. She moved to Boston in 1853 as did her future husband, John Oliver (1821 - 1899) a free black carpenter and an abolitionist from Petersburg, Virginia. They divorced sometime in 1862. Sources do not indicate that De Mortie ever remarried and there is no mention of surviving children.

From 1865 until her death, De Mortie continued her work as a fundraiser for the orphanage, traveling to Boston, Philadelphia and other northern cities where she was well known to raise funds for the institution. It was necessary for her to do this because of the difficulties the orphanage experienced at the end of the Civil War and after the assassination of President Lincoln. Andrew Johnson (Lincoln's vice president) did not support the previous administration's humanitarian stance. At the time of the new administration's defunding, it was proposed that the orphans were to be apprenticed to various employers (likely plantation owners) until the age of 15 for females and 18 for males. This would reinstate de facto enslavement for the orphaned children ... akin to reversing emancipation for black children who lacked parental support. With this huge upheaval the orphans narrowly escaped being apprenticed by the government to their former owners, by being moved to Marine Hospital, still under the protection of the Freedman’s Bureau, while funds continued to be raised.

She died on October 10, 1867, in New Orleans during a yellow fever epidemic.

Sources: National Anti-Slavery Standard, October 26, 1867; Notable Black American Women, Book 2 by Jessie Carney Smith; Sacred Ground by A. Craig Fisher, Ph.D.; Eugene A. Piffet, photographer