The Development of a Dissenter (1847–1870)

This chapter details the early life of Anna Howard Shaw. Anna was born on St. Valentine's Day in 1847 to Thomas and Nicolas Shaw, in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in northeast England, the sixth child and the third daughter of a bankrupt Scottish family. While all members of such struggling families in the mid-nineteenth century faced bleak and limited futures, girl-children, if they survived, had even fewer opportunities. In 1849, her father Thomas sailed for the United States, and in August 1851 Nicolas and her six children boarded the Jacob A. Westervelt in Liverpool for what was to be a seven-week passage to New York. The family made their first American home in the old whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts. They then moved to a new mill town, Lawrence, in the North on the Merrimac River, which would be their home for the next seven years, during the nation-changing decade of the 1850s. When the Civil War started in April 1861, Anna's two brothers and father volunteered. At only sixteen, Anna shouldered the responsibility for her family's survival.