Mary S. Peake to Simeon Jocelyn

In September 1861, Mary S. Peake, an African American educator from northern Virginia and later nearby Hampton, became the first teacher for the freedmen at Fort Monroe. Peake had previously worked as a dressmaker and had devoted years of her life to secretly teaching slaves and free people of color to read and write, an activity that was illegal in antebellum Virginia. Peake taught her first classes at Fort Monroe under the shade of a large oak tree; this tree, which later became known as Emancipation Oak, was the site of the first public reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in the South. It stands near the entrance to Hampton University. In this letter, Peake notes the death of two students. Ironically, Peake would die the next month of tuberculosis at the age of 39.