Half a century

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At the beginning of her autobiography, Jane Swisshelm announces that she intends to show the relationship of faith to the antislavery struggle, to record incidents characteristic of slavery, to provide an inside look at hospitals during the Civil War, to look at the conditions giving rise to the nineteenth-century struggle for women's rights, and to demonstrate, through her own life, the "mutability of human character." After her father's death in 1823, she helped support her family through hard work and teaching school. Her marriage in 1836 to James Swisshelm, a Methodist farmer's son, resulted in continual conflict with her husband's family, who sought to convert her to their own beliefs. After a few years in Louisville, Kentucky, where Swisshelm observed slavery first-hand, she left her husband to nurse her mother in Pittsburgh. She wrote several articles for the antislavery Spirit of Liberty and the Pittsburgh Commercial Journal, then in 1848 started her own anti-slavery newspaper, the Pittsburg Saturday Visiter [sic]. Her views on slavery, women's issues, and the Mexican- American War soon attracted a national readership. In 1856 she started another abolitionist paper, the Democrat, and began to lecture frequently on slavery and the legal disabilities of women. She opposed those who advocated leniency for the leaders of the 1862 Sioux uprising, and took her cause to Washington, D.C., on the advice of state officials. While there she secured a position nursing wounded Union soldiers and raising supplies for their benefit. Her narrative ends with her discharge and retirement to an old log block house on ten acres of her husband's family holdings.