Lewis C. Lockwood to the American Missionary Association (page 1)

Despite her failing health, Mary Peake rejected her physician’s advice to abandon her education work or be “lost to earth.” Here, in one of several memorial tributes to Peake after her death, Lewis Lockwood, the American Missionary Association's (AMA) agent, reflected that Peake was committed to the mission of educating freed persons, even on her deathbed. He stated, “It was beautiful, though sad, to see her as I did, when too sick to sit, lying upon her bed, surrounded by her scholars, teaching them to read, and by her sweet patient submission to the hand of God upon her, most earnestly teaching them that religion can support the soul even if the body dies.” Peake’s school marked the beginning of the AMA’s movement to educate freedmen, and in death she became the AMA’s first casualty in this campaign.