IV
AUNT JANE
The Red Song Woman
Miss Jane Smith Williamson, the subject of this sketch, was one of the famous missionary women in our land in the nineteenth century. She was widely known among both whites and Indians as "Aunt Jane." The Dakotas also called her "Red Song Woman." She was born at Fair Forest, South Carolina, March 8, 1803. Through her father she was a lineal descendant of the Rev. John Newton and Sir Isaac Newton. Her father was a revolutionary soldier.
Her mother was Jane (Smith) Williamson. They believed that negroes had souls and therefore treated the twenty-seven slaves they had inherited like human beings. Her mother was fined in South Carolina, for teaching her slaves to read the Bible. Consequently, in 1804, in her early infancy, her parents emigrated to Adams county, Ohio, in order to be able to free their slaves and teach them to read the Word of God and write legibly.
The story of Aunt Jane's life naturally falls into three divisions.
I—PREPARATION FOR HER GREAT LIFE WORK.
This covered forty years. She grew up in an atmosphere of sincere and deep piety and of devotion to Christian principles. Her early educational advantages were necessarily limited, but she made the most of them. She became very accurate in the use of language, wrote a clear round hand and was very thorough in everything she studied. She was a great reader of good and useful books, possessed an excellent memory and a lively imagination and very early acquired a most interesting style of composition.
Aunt Jane,
Or, The Red Song Woman.
From her ancestors she inherited that strong sympathy for the colored race, which was a marked characteristic of her whole life. In her young womanhood, she taught private schools in Adams county, Ohio. The progress made by her pupils was very rapid and her instruction was of a high order. She sought out the children of the poor and taught them without charge. She admitted colored pupils as well as whites. For this cause, many threats of violence were made against her school. But she was such an excellent teacher that her white pupils remained with her; and a guard of volunteer riflemen frequently surrounded her school house. She calmly pursued the even tenor of her way.