Was lydia hamilton smith black

Lydia smith timcast wiki
Lydia Hamilton Smith was the long-time housekeeper of Thaddeus Stevens and a prominent businesswoman after his death.
Lydia Hamilton Smith (1813–1884) was a prominent African American businesswoman in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the longtime housekeeper, life companion.

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Abolitionist and African American Businesswoman

S. Epatha Merkerson plays Lydia Hamilton Smith in the 2012 film Lincoln, alongside Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens. The movie stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln and Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln. Merkerson owes much of her fame to her role as Lt. Anita Van Buren on the original Law and Order television series.

Lydia Hamilton Smith had a special relationship with U.S. Congressman Thaddeus Stevens. She became Stevens’ housekeeper in 1847, and for 25 years she managed his homes and businesses. Through their partnership she gained the skills and social contacts necessary to become a successful businesswoman after his death.

Lydia Hamilton was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on February 14, 1815, to an African mother and Irish father. She married a free black man named Jacob Smith and bore two sons but they separated before he died in 1852 and she raised the children alone.

Thaddeus Stevens was born in Danville, Vermont, on April 4, 1792. He suffered from many hardships during his childhood, including a club

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An Uncommon Woman

Lydia Hamilton Smith (1813–1884) was a prominent African American businesswoman in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the longtime housekeeper, life companion, and collaborator of the state’s abolitionist congressman Thaddeus Stevens. In his biography of this remarkable woman, Mark Kelley reveals how Smith served the cause of abolition, managed Stevens’s household, acquired property, and crossed racialized social boundaries.

Born a free woman near Gettysburg, Smith began working for Stevens in 1844. Her relationship with Stevens fascinated and infuriated many, and it made Smith a highly recognizable figure both locally and nationally. The two walked side by side in Lancaster and in Washington, DC, as they worked to secure the rights of African Americans, sheltered people on the Underground Railroad, managed two households, raised her sons and his nephews, and built a real-estate business. In the last years of Stevens’s life, as his declining health threatened to short-circuit his work, Smith risked her own well-being to keep him alive while he

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Book Review: An Uncommon Woman: The Life of Lydia Hamilton Smith

An Uncommon Woman: The Life of Lydia Hamilton Smith. By Mark Kelley. University Park: PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023. Softcover, 280 pp. $24.95.

Reviewed by Tim Talbott

At the close of Steven Spielberg’s motion picture Lincoln, a cane-dependent, limping, club-footed Thaddeus Stevens (played by Tommy Lee Jones) takes the official copy of the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution from the House clerk with the promise that he will bring it back “in the morning creased but unharmed.” Stevens, the Radical Republican congressman who helped push the amendment though, walks his way to his Washington D.C. domicile where he receives greetings by his resident woman of color housekeeper Lydia Hamilton Smith (played by S. Epatha Merkerson). Stevens hands the copy to Smith with the words: “A gift for you.” The scene then switches to Stevens’ bedroom, showing him getting into bed next to Smith who is reading the amendment. He says he wishes she could have been there, and she said she wished she would have