Lady Lawyer

Mary Ann Shadd Cary was an educator and abolitionist.  She was the first black woman to graduate from Howard University Law School and the first black woman to vote in a federal election.  She helped President Lincoln enlist black men to fight for the Union and her house was frequently a safe haven in the Underground Railroad for slaves fleeing the South.  After the war she became a school principal, and then a lawyer in Washington, D.C., at the age of sixty.  She died in 1893 at age seventy from heart failure, with an estate valued at $150.