African American samplers from antebellum Baltimore.

A middle ground between the free commercial North and the agrarian slaveholding South, Baltimore became a magnet for free people of color in the years leading up to the Civil War. Early church-connected efforts by African Americans gave girls there the opportunity to improve their situation in life. The needlework education offered at schools sponsored by two of these religious groups went beyond the utilitarian hemming and marking of linens required of servants and included embroidery, a pastime of accomplished white women. Although from very modest circumstances, a number of students acquired needle skills and worked samplers that were the equivalent in style and expertise to those worked in the most fashionable schools in Baltimore. (1)

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By 1820 Baltimore had a population of nearly sixty-three thousand, of whom more than ten thousand were free people of color. (2) The city was the center of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, with the first diocese being established there in 1789. Francophone Catholics, fleeing revolutions in France and the Caribbean, soon found a welcome refuge in Baltimore, where a group of French priests from the Society of Saint Sulpice conducted religious services in French and established Saint Mary's Seminary and Saint Mary's College to prepare young men for the priesthood. (3) Many of the Caribbean refugees were people of color, both free and enslaved, who had left Saint Domingue (now called Haiti) when the planter class was overthrown in a revolt led by Toussaint Louverture (c. 1743-1803) that began in 1791. Some sailed directly to Baltimore; others migrated to New Orleans, Charleston, and other southern port towns before making their home in Maryland.

In 1828 Jacques Hector Nicholas Joubert de la Muraille (1777-1843), a Sulpician priest, asked Elizabeth Clarisse Lange (c. 1784-1882) and Marie Balas (d. 1845), experienced black teachers, to establish the first formal school, as opposed to Sunday school, for black children under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church. (4) Both emigres from Saint Domingue. Lange and Balas had previously taught children from a wide economic spectrum of Baltimore's black French-speaking community.

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The two women, joined by another emigre from Saint Domingue Rosine Boegue (or Boegues; c. 1790-1871), expressed their desire to also form a religious community with Father Joubert as their spiritual adviser. In 1829, along with Baltimore native Almaide Duchemin (1809-1892), they pronounced simple vows and became the charter members of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first permanent order of Roman Catholic women of African descent in the United States. They adopted as their patron Saint Frances of Rome (1384-1440), who had founded an Oblate community in the fifteenth century. Lange became the first superior of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, taking the name Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange. (5)

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