Delia Webster was a teacher and abolitionist in Kentucky, where she was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Tried and convicted for helping runaway slaves in their escape to freedom, she was the first woman imprisoned for assisting fugitive slaves. Webster was also an artist, writer, and an independent woman, unusual for her time.
Delia Ann Webster was born December 17, 1817, one of four daughters born to Benejah and Esther Bostwick Webster in Vergennes, Vermont. She attended the Vergennes Classical School, and began teaching school at 12 years of age. She then attended <a href="http://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2014/10/women-of-oberlin-college.html">Oberlin College</a> in Ohio, the first college in the United States to accept women and
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Funds were raised in Vermont for Webster's defense. Her attorneys managed to win her a separate trial, since most of the evidence pointed toward Fairbank. There was considerable sympathy for her. Webster pled not guilty, but was convicted in December 1844 and sentenced to two years in the state prison.
It was said that "Northern Kentucky suffered greatly for her effective work." Webster's abolitionist efforts in Lexington were described in a 1921 article in Indiana Magazine of History:
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She came to be hated by the slave masters as well as feared by them. While nothing could be established against her, she was constantly under suspicion and was subjected to threats intermingled with much persecution. With all this opposition, she continued her work just the same, traveling from one locality to another, always coming in contact with slaves and teaching them the avenues of escape and very frequently aiding them directly in the work herself.
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Imprisonment
The judge sentenced Delia Webster to two years at hard labor in the Kentucky State Penitentiary at the state capital in Frankfort, which she entered January 19, 1845. Because she was the only female prisoner in the penitentiary, she was housed in a wooden cottage in the center of the prison