Mary H. C. Booth

Mary H. C. Booth
Mary Booth (sittende) med Mathilde Franziska Anneke
Born	1831  Connecticut
Died	April 11, 1865  (aged 33–34) New York City
Occupation	Poet
Spouse(s)	Sherman Booth
Partner(s)	Mathilde Franziska Anneke

Mary Humphrey Corss Booth (1831 – April 11, 1865) was an American poet and abolitionist. She published the collection Wayside Blossoms Among Flowers from German Gardens (1865).

Mary Humphrey Corss was born in 1831 in Connecticut,^[1] the daughter of John and Adelaide Corss. She was visiting relatives Milwaukee, Wisconsin when she met Sherman Booth, the recently-widowed abolitionist journalist and speaker. Over the objections of her parents and only two months after the death of his first wife, the 18-year-old Corss and the 36-year-old Booth married in 1849. They had three daughters: Mary Ella, Alice, and Lillian May. Alice died in infancy.^[2]

In February 1859, Sherman Booth was accused of rape by a fourteen-year-old babysitter. The resulting trial ended in a hung jury, and the Booth marriage was functionally over. The next March, Sherman Booth was arrested for assisting in the escape of fugitive slave Joshua Glover. Mary Booth helped organize two failed attempts to forcibly free Sherman Booth from prison before leaving him and the United States in June 1860.^[2][3]

Booth moved to Zurich with one of her daughters and the German writer, radical, and feminist Mathilde Franziska Anneke. Booth and Anneke enjoyed a romantic relationship, the exact nature of which has been debated. They worked as freelance journalists and collaborated on an unpublished anthology of abolitionist stories. In June 1864, Booth and her daughter returned to the United States due to Booth's worsening tuberculosis and desire to be reunited with her family.^[2][3][4][5]

Booth lived in a New York City boarding house and died on April 11, 1865.^[2]

References

1. "Booth, Mary H. C." . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. Vol. I. 1900. p. 320.
2. Faulkner, Carol (2019). Unfaithful : love, adultery, and marriage reform in nineteenth-century America. Philadelphia. pp. 84–98. ISBN 978-0-8122-5155-5. OCLC 1097958873.
3. Honeck, Mischa (2011). We are the revolutionists : German-speaking immigrants & American abolitionists after 1848. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press. pp. 104–136. ISBN 978-0-8203-3960-3. OCLC 724467057.
4. "A German-American Feminist and her Female Marriages: Mathilde Franziska Anneke (1817-1884)". www.fembio.org. Retrieved 2022-07-25.
5. Efford, Alison Clark (2021). "Introduction". Radical relationships : the Civil War-era correspondence of Mathilde Franziska Anneke. Viktorija Bilić, Alison Clark Efford. Athens. pp. 13–20. ISBN 978-0-8203-6024-9. OCLC 1268361098.