Mary Mildred Williams

In 1855, her escaped father bought his family's freedom with financial aid from abolitionists, and she, her mother and siblings joined him in Boston, Massachusetts.

After arriving in Boston at the age of seven, Williams's photograph became widely distributed, as her appearance was startling for white people who were not used to resembling slaves.

Williams was compared to Ida May, the main character in a popular novel of that name; she was a white girl who was kidnapped and sold into slavery.

[1] At the time of Mary's birth, her mother, brother, grandmother, and aunts were enslaved in Prince William County, Virginia, near the village of Washington.

[1] The maternal side of Williams' family were the subjects of protracted legal battles waged by descendants of Jesse and Constance Cornwell.

[1][3] Through her father, Humphrey Calvert, Constance had purchased Williams's maternal great-grandmother, Lettice (known as "Letty"), and grandmother, Prudence Bell (known as "Prucy" or "Pru"), between 1809 and 1812.

[4][5] According to court and census records, Williams' mother, Elizabeth, was the daughter of Prudence and a white man named Thomas Nelson, who was Cornwell's executor.

[12] In a subsequent article dated March 9, 1855, reporters of the New-York Daily Times expressed "astonishment" that the girl was "ever held a slave".

[13] In early 1855, articles were published about Mary Williams in the Boston Telegraph and the New York Times, and copies of her photograph were widely publicized.

[16]Abolitionists emphasized Williams's perceived whiteness to enlist sympathy, and to suggest to Northerners that any child, regardless of appearance, might be snatched and made a slave.

On May 19 and 20, 1856, Sumner spoke in the Senate comparing Southern political positions to the sexual exploitation of slaves then taking place in the South.