Sampler

This attractively composed sampler is one of only 35 known to have been stitched by a young Black American woman between 1789 and 1887.




The life of its maker, Angenett Jackson, is well-documented. She was a free Black girl born in Boston, in 1823, to prominent Black abolitionist Elizabeth Cook Jackson Riley (c.1792-1855), who among other activities helped raise funds towards the publication of William Lloyd Garrison’s popular antislavery newspaper, The Liberator (1831-1865). Angenett enters the public record in the May 17, 1834 issue of The Liberator, in an article about "The Garrison Juvenile Society," which was the name of the private school for Black children that Angenett attended, taught by Mrs. Nancy Jasper. Although Black children were allowed to study in Boston’s White public schools, often separate schools were created for them by community members. According to the article, in a program meant to show the skills of the school’s students, ten-year old Angenett recited a piece entitled "On Religion," perhaps the very same verse that appears on her later sampler. The article reported that the school had 94 students who attended at the cost of 1 penny per week, and donations "had recently been given to carry on needle-work and painting" lessons by a "Miss Brown," in addition to the reading, spelling and basic sewing already taught by Mrs. Jasper. The Garrison Juvenile Society may have met in a classroom in the African Meeting House (1806). Mrs. Jasper’s husband Samuel was a deacon at the church. The Garrison Juvenile Society closed in 1836, and when Angenett made this sampler in 1838, she was probably a student at the new Abiel Smith School, which opened in 1835 as a public school for Black children in a building adjacent to the African Meeting House.




Angenett married Eli Caesar in 1864, when she was 39, after his first wife died. Eli was a barber, and the couple lived in Boston’s West End. Eli died in 1878, while Angenett survived him by twenty-five years, dying in 1903, at the age of 80.