Lathrap, then assistant surgeon of the Ninth Michigan Cavalry. In 1865 they removed to Jackson, Mich., where they now reside. Mrs. Lathrap there joined the Methodist Episcopal Church, of which
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MARY TORRANS LATHRAP.
her husband was a member, and in the class-room began first to exercise her gifts of speech in the services. In 1871 she was licensed to preach the gospel and began in the Congregational Church in Michigan Center. Her sermons aroused the people, and for years she labored as an evangelist, many thousands being converted by her ministry. She took an active part in the Woman's crusade, was one of the founders of the woman's Christian Temperance Union, and has been president of the State union of Michigan since 1882. Her work has been largely devoted to that organization for the past eight years. She has labored in various States and was a strong helper in securing the scientific-instruction law, and in the Michigan,
Nebraska and Dakota amendment campaigns. In 1878 she secured the passage of a bill in the Michigan legislature appropriating thirty-thousand dollars for the establishment of the Girls' Industrial Home, a reformatory school, located in Adrian. In 1890 she was a member of the Woman's Council in Washington, D. C. Her evangelistic and platform work has taken the best part of her life and effort, but her literary work entitles her to consideration. Her p<>ems are meritorious productions, and she has written enough to fill a large volume. During the years of her great activity in evangelistic and
temperance work her literary impulses were over-shadowed by the great moral work in which she was engaged. Recently she has written more. Her memorial odes to Garfield and Gough have been widely quoted, as have also many other of her poems. Her lectures have always been successful, and she is equally at home on the temperance platform, on the lecture platform, in the pulpit or at the author's desk. Her oratory caused her to be styled "The Daniel Webster of Prohibition," a name well-suited to her.
LATHROP, Miss Clarissa Caldwell, reformer, was born in Rochester, N. Y., and died in Saratoga, N. Y., nth September, 1892. She was a daughter of the late Gen. William E. Lathrop, a
Brigadier General of the National Guard.
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CLARISSA CALDWELL LATHROP.
Soon after her graduation from the Rochester academy she became a teacher, which, owing to her father's failure in business, became a means of support to her family as well as to herself. She continued to teach successfully until her unlawful imprisonment in the Utica insane asylum. Her strange experience was the consummation of the scheme of a secret enemy to put her out of existence by a poison, pronounced by medical authority to be aconite, when her life was saved on two occasions by the care of two friends, he took some tea to a chemist for analysis, as she was desirous of obtaining reliable proof before making open charges against any one, and at the instigation of a doctor who was in sympathy with the plot to kidnap her, she went to Utica to consult Dr. Grey. Instead of seeing Dr. Grey upon her arrival, she was incarcerated with the insane, without the commitment papers required by law, and kept a close prisoner for twenty-six months. At last she managed to communicate with James B. Silkman, a New York lawyer, who had been forcibly carried off
and imprisoned in the same insane asylum. He obtained a writ of habeas corpus at once, and in December, 1882, Judge Barnard of the Supreme Court pronounced her sane and unlawfully incarcerated,
immediately upon her restoration to freedom she went before the legislature, and stated her experience and the necessity for reform in that direction. After making another fruitless effort the succeeding year, she found herself homeless and penniless, and
dependent upon a cousin's generosity for shelter and support, and was forced to begin life anew under the
