Believing "in resistance to tyrants, [for which she] would fight for liberty until death," Charlotte in practice determined that her studies "aid me for fitting myself in laboring for a holy cause, for enabling me to do much towards changing the condition of my oppressed and suffering people." Virtually simultaneously with her arrival in Salem, terrible proof of the brutality of the Fugitive Slave Law occurred in Boston when authorities wrested an escaped slave, Anthony Burns, from his benefactors and returned him by Federal marshals to his master amid near riot conditions. This incident, deeply grieving Charlotte, prompted Robert Forten to carry out his plan to move his family to Canada. He excluded Charlotte and she remained in Salem with the Remonds.

Her concern for her race and her own father's alienation inclined Charlotte to regard Sarah Remond - Charles' sister who resided with him - as a role model. To her diary Charlotte confided that Sarah was "much older and far more experienced than I," adding "how often do I wish I had a sister." Sarah Remond's interest in education as a tool for racial betterment perhaps decisively influenced Charlotte's eventual decision to attend the normal School.

EARLY A DECADE earlier a courageous black youth from Roxbury forged Charlotte Forten's way to advance her education. In the early 1840s Abolitionists determined to test the color line of the normal schools then located in West Newton, Bridgewater, and Barre. The test case arose in 1847. Samuel May, principal of West Newton, admitted Cloe Lee. Outraged townspeople refused to rent a room to the girl. Horace Mann welcomed her into his own home, causing friends and relatives - including his sister-in-law Sophia, the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne - to deplore his inflicting the girl's presence on them. Cloe admitted that she suffered slights at the school as well, but reasoned that her sacrifices eased the way for other blacks to enter the normal school system.

In the midst of the Abolitionist activities of the times, her own anti-slavery passions notwithstanding, Charlotte enjoyed a genteel life. Not only her studies, but also her pastimes centered around readings, including Byron, Elizabeth Browning, Phyllis Wheatley, Chaucer, Wordsworth, Whittier, Emerson, and Milton. She attended lectures locally, in Boston and across the state, especially enjoying talks by travelers to England, which had abolished slavery some twenty years earlier.

Charlotte counted among her acquaintances the sister of Nathaniel Hawthorne who, on an outing to Marblehead Beach, "gave me a singular stone 'to remember the place by' she said." Charlotte, enthralled by historical and scientific exhibits and artifacts, frequently visited the Essex Institute, which, unlike the East India Marine Society, admitted blacks. She often gathered with friends to read and recite to one another, to play piano for mutual enjoyment, and to engage in card games. She especially relished walking, alone or with friends, and on occasion ventured hikes to Beverly and Danvers. Her daily life reflected pastimes of proper young ladies of the period, both black and white, although her unyielding passion for the fiery lectures of the Abolitionists remained constant.

. . . she perceived education as
the means by which her
passion might be fulfilled.

Whether the propriety of her life functioned within the context of her unswerving abolitionism, or her passionate social consciousness belied her gentlewoman's cultured ways, Charlotte pursued without abeyance her goal, "to prepare myself well for the responsible duties of a teacher, and to live for the good that I can do my oppressed and suffering fellow creatures." Often rising at four in the morning to study, she perceived education as the means by which her passion might be fulfilled. "I told my dear teacher [Miss Shepard]," Charlotte wrote, "that if I could in the very least degree help lessen the cruel, unjust prejudice which exists against us, I would go willingly."

Charlotte later counted this time as happy, finding outlet for both her antislavery fervor and her insatiable intellectual appetite. At the close of 1854, she wrote that she was "happy, because the field of knowledge, for the first time, has seemed widely open to me, [I have] learned more than during any other year of my life." Of Shepard she added "to me no one can ever supply her place."