Sawyer's maternal grandfather (with whom she lived with a widowed mother and a highly educated but invalid uncle) was John Kendrick, who commanded a company at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and was a conscientious abolitionist.

[3] At a Baptist Sunday school, where the Bible and Isaac Watts' hymns were committed to memory, Sawyer recited the first eight chapters of the Gospel of Mark when she was just eight years old.

Before the age of ten, she had read Shakespeare, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Plutarch's Parallel Lives, as well as Hume's and Smollett's History of England.

[3] At school, after eating lunch, she would improvise stories of knights and ladies, fairies and hobgoblins, for her fellow students.

This continued until the invalid uncle, whose life had been passed in pursuits of science and literature, removed her from the country school to his own supervision.

For several years, she was a constant contributor to the "Odd Fellows' Magazine," published in Baltimore, Maryland; and for Horace Greeley's "New Yorker".

[3] Sawyer became editor of the "Rose of Sharon" in 1849; she was a constant contributor from its first appearance, in 1840, during Sarah Carter Edgarton Mayo's editorship.