Ann Randolph Meade Page
She did not believe in slavery, and while she was unable to free slaves, she focused on improving their conditions by teaching them to read and write, Christianity, a wide range of domestic skills and trades.
After the founding of the American Colonization Society and, after the death of her husband, she emancipated enslaved people and prepared them to leave the United States for the colony of Liberia in West Africa, where they and their family members would live free.
[5] Her brother, William Meade, became a bishop and promoted "a conversion experience followed by a personal relationship with God, a life of moral discipline, identification with the evangelical community, missionary enterprise, and religious reform.
She had a hard time managing the depth of the difference between being one of the largest slaveholders in Frederick County, Virginia and believing that no person should be enslaved.
[6] On the Sabbath after church, I was going, according to the general custom, to dine out; but the spirit of God spoke better counsel, and enabled me to turn into a solitary November home, without a white person near.
We began a conversation in which she used expressions respecting entire confidence in Christ, which made an indelible impression upon my mind, being quite clear to me at this distant period.
[3] Along with her daughter, Sarah Page Andrews, and her brother, William Meade, she supported the transportation and settlement of freed slaves in Liberia.
[6][4] Page worked with her brother, William Meade, and with Mary Lee Fitzhugh Custis to end slavery and improve the conditions of enslaved people.
[6] She became an active and supportive member of the Society that mentored the white men who were agents and managers, including her future son-in-law Christopher Wesley Andrews.
[3] Her efforts to free slaves led her to be considered "one of the most benevolent of colonizationist emancipators, and the people she freed — most members of an extended family with the same Page surname.
"[3] Although (and because) they were affluent slaveholders, a few antislavery activists, northern or southern, were as committed and influential as Ann R. Page and Mary L. Curtis.
They embraced colonization, a movement that began and had its greatest support in the Upper South, because it relied on moral suasion, offered African Americans a refuge from prejudice and legal inequality they suffered in the United States, and helped to diffuse white's fears about the growing number of free blacks.
