Mary S. Peake: The Colored Teacher at Fortress Monroe

The memoir traces Mary S. Peake’s early life, mixed parentage, and education, her growing religious convictions and charitable labors, and her work as the first teacher among freed people at Fortress Monroe where she opened schools and helped establish Sabbath and weekday religious instruction. It recounts her declining health, final messages, death, and funeral, and closes with an appendix by the missionary who organized the freedmen’s mission describing the development of congregations and schools, government support, daily occupations of the freed people, and observations on their learning, industriousness, and piety.