United States. In addition to co-founding the New York Infirmary, she helped organize the Women's Central Association of Relief, which selected and trained nurses for service in the Civil War. Sarah Ellen Blackwell (1828–1901) was an artist and author best known for writing the first full-length biography of Anna Ella Carroll. (John) Howard Blackwell (1831–1866) returned to England and worked in iron manufacturing with a cousin, then joined the East India Company. His death at the age of 36 was a blow to the entire family. George Washington Blackwell (1832–1912), the only Blackwell sibling born in the United States, became a land agent under Henry's tutelage in the 1850s, studied law in New York City, and took over Henry Blackwell's real estate business in the late 1860s. Courtship and marriage Blackwell was smitten by Lucy Stone when he heard her speak at an antislavery meeting in New York in May 1853, moving her audience to tears with what became known as her "fugitive mother" speech. He followed her to Massachusetts and obtained a formal letter of introduction from William Lloyd Garrison. Although Stone gladly accepted him as a friend, she rejected him as a suitor because she believed marriage would require her to surrender control over herself and prevent her from pursuing her chosen work. But Blackwell, not having been rejected personally, determined to convince Stone that marriage to him would require sacrifice of neither individuality nor career. He maintained that a marriage based on equality would enable each of them to accomplish more than they could alone. He, too, wanted to work for the good of humanity, but believed he must wait until he had attained the freedom to command his own time and action—"pecuniary independence," which he expected to achieve in three years. Through correspondence over the summer, Blackwell and Stone discussed the nature and faults of the marriage institution and the benefits of a true, ideal marriage. Then, eager to demonstrate how he could help Stone accomplish more, Blackwell offered to arrange a lecture tour for her in the west (then the mid-western states of Indiana, Illinois, and western Ohio and Kentucky). She accepted, and he wrote to business acquaintances to engage halls and place newspaper notice while personally printing and mailing broadsides for posting. From mid-October 1853 through the first week of January 1854, Stone lectured on women's rights in more than ten cities in five