Ann Carroll Fitzhugh

Ann Carroll Fitzhugh (1805–1875) was an American abolitionist, mother of Elizabeth Smith Miller, and the spouse to Gerrit Smith. Her older brother was Henry Fitzhugh. Ann Fitzhugh and Gerrit Smith’s Peterboro, New York home was a station on the Underground Railroad. Known as “Nancy," Ann Fitzhugh Smith frequently traveled via an enclosed carriage to permit her carriage to be used, in her absence, to convey veiled fugitives on their way to Canada. In 1822, Fitzhugh – living in Rochester, New York and formerly of Hagerstown, Maryland – married Gerrit Smith. Ann was devout and was influential in Gerrit Smith’s religious conversion and beliefs about social reform and slavery.

The Smith household hosted both abolitionist and early suffrage meetings in the pre-Civil War period. As a child in Chewsville, near Hagerstown, Maryland, Ann Carroll Fitzhugh was given a slave, Harriet Sims, who was sold and was further enslaved in Kentucky, with her spouse Samuel Russell. Ann and Gerrit located the Russells, purchased their freedom in 1841 and aided them in settling at Peterboro. The Smith couple had joined the abolition movement fully in October 1835, after a meeting of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society in Utica, New York was forcibly broken up by local slaving sympathizers. Ann and Gerrit interceded from the audience, and offered the Peterboro mansion as a safe haven to reconvene the gathering. While Ann’s daughter Elizabeth attended a Quaker school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Ann stayed in the city for extended periods during 1836, 1837 and 1839. These stays brought Ann into the circle of Lucretia and James Mott, abolitionists C.C. Burleigh and Mary Grew. Ann and her daughter taught Sunday school in one of Philadelphia’s African-American communities.

Ann was seventeen when she married Smith. According to one historian, “Ann brought warmth and cheerful serenity to her new home, and she and Gerrit had a very loving marriage, ‘Heaven has broke loose!’ Gerrit once exclaimed when Ann entered the room. “ The Smiths lived in a large frame house facing Peterboro green. It was built in the hall-and-parlour style, with a large central hall front to back. The library of about 2,000 volumes, dining room and kitchen flanked the central hall on one side; a parlour and conservatory lay on the other. The Smiths emphasized equality, simplicity, intellectualism and spirituality in their domestic life. After 1835, the two would not serve food grown with slave labor. During the 1830s, the Smiths deemphasized their Calvinist theology and began exploring the perfectionist and ultraist beliefs common in the Christian Union movement. This led to their founding Free Churches at Oswego and Peterboro, New York in 1839 and 1843 respectively.

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