Elizabeth’s grandfather, Jacob Cartwright, was a Revolutionary War soldier — a detail that Frederick Douglass’ Paper included in its coverage of the verdict, because it established the depth of the family’s roots in American history and the particular bitterness of their treatment as outsiders in a country their forebears had fought to create.
Her mother, Elizabeth Cartwright Jennings, was a founding member of the Ladies Literary Society and a writer and public speaker in her own right. Her brothers were connected to the abolitionist networks that linked New York’s Black community to national figures including William Garrison, William Nell, and Douglass himself.
Elizabeth Jennings was not an isolated individual who happened to resist one day; she was a member of an organized, politically engaged community, raised in a family that had been fighting these battles for decades, and embedded in networks that knew exactly how to respond when she came home from that Sunday with a damaged bonnet and a story to tell.
## Life After the Verdict
Elizabeth Jennings’s public presence continued in the years after the trial. She attended fundraisers for community causes and maintained correspondence with Douglass, with William Nell, and with Timothy Thomas Fortune, a prominent Black journalist who became one of the leading voices for Black civil rights in the late nineteenth century. She was not a person who receded from public life after her moment of legal victory.
In June 1860, she married Charles Graham, who was originally from Long Branch, New Jersey. The couple had a son, Thomas J. Graham, named for her father.