ABSTRACT
Lucy Ware Webb was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, on August 28, 1831, to James Webb and Maria Cook Webb, who had been married five years and already had two sons. Lucy's father, a medical doctor, was antislavery, even though he was from the South. In 1833 he returned to his family's home in Lexington, Kentucky, to free fifteen to twenty slaves he had inherited from his aunt. When he arrived there, he worked day and night caring for the sick in a cholera epidemic, in which his parents and brother died. Dr. Webb, too, became a victim of the epidemic, dying before his wife reached his bedside. Lucy proudly recalled her mother's response to friends' advice that she sell the slaves her husband had come to free: Before she would sell a slave, her mother said, she would take in washing to support her family.
