PHILADELPHIA — History is alive and well here. I came to give a talk about Lucretia Mott, the Quaker heroine of social justice before the Civil War, and ran into Abraham Lincoln.

The two major change makers were alive at the same time. Mott could not work through the political system, but she became famous for speaking out against slavery. She was a leading light in a dark chapter, the 1840s and 1850s. Lifting her voice in her Quaker manner — as the spirit moved — she traveled all over the land. She even sailed to London, with her husband James, for the World Anti-Slavery Convention, where she became a media darling.

Yes, Mott had the charisma to move people way beyond the walls of her Quaker world. Her house was almost burned down by a mob, but that did not silence her. She further enraged critics when she took her abolitionist principles and applied them to women's rights in 1848. As the main speaker at Seneca Falls, where the first women's rights convention was held, she laid the foundation for a movement that finally won the right to vote in 1920. Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist orator, declared her "incomparably great, bearing a message of light and love."

Imagine this: John Quincy Adams invited her to speak in Washington in 1843, a rare distinction for anyone, let alone a woman, to try to reach and change Southern slave owners in Congress. Ralph Waldo Emerson was in a packed pew of the Unitarian Church on that cold winter night, and could not believe how she transported the gathering, cutting the ice between North and South. She urged those there to free their slaves, quoting lyrical Biblical passages. Her voice rose like a river. The event made the newspapers, one woman's voice in the wilderness against the slave trade, which was visible on the streets of democracy's capital.

Keep in mind that 1843 is 20 years before President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing all enslaved Americans in the Confederacy. Mott was ahead of her time, ahead of the Great Emancipator. Quakers and others who organized the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves practically invented American civil disobedience.

I fell for Mott as a sophomore, seeing her portrait in my college parlor. The penetrating eyes, framed by a bonnet, seemed to still speak. Ever since then, I have made it a point to keep her memory alive, because she gets lost in translation. We have no record of her voice, and that was her gift. She was not a writer, really; it was her spoken words that changed antebellum America — slowly but surely. She is one of the few women portrayed in the Capitol Rotunda, but most people walk past her sculpture — along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton — without knowing why.

Oh, what a Friend she was. Invited to speak her for a "Women of Philadelphia" documentary now in the works by Sam Katz, I shared some stories of her girlhood on Nantucket Island, a Quaker community. Then she lived the rest of her life in the Quaker City. Her faith was always around her, like the air she breathed. It is no accident that a Quaker girl, raised to speak her mind, became America's first history heroine.

I stayed in a beautiful historic hotel called the Union League in the heart of the city. Little did I know that "Union" referred back to 1862, when Philadelphia's leading men raised more soldiers for the Civil War effort.

It was history buff heaven, with portraits of Lincoln and — if you can believe this — the very podium Lincoln used when he delivered the Gettysburg Address. I actually touched it and let me tell you, I needed my smelling salts.

Mott and other abolitionists set the stage for Lincoln's grand act. Persuasion and resistance for years made the public mind more receptive to slave emancipation. Lincoln did not call himself an abolitionist and did not come to office with that intention. Their long change campaign worked on him, too.

It's a shame that Mott and Lincoln never came face-to-face — especially for Lincoln. The two kindred spirits, from inside and outside the political system, would have much to talk about.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm, and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

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