Death of Catharine White Coffin

Catharine White Coffin died on May 22, 1881, in Cincinnati, Ohio, at the age of seventy-seven. Her death marked the end of a life devoted almost entirely to the cause of anti-slavery activism and, following the Civil War, to the welfare of formerly enslaved people.

By the time of her death, Catharine had witnessed the abolition of slavery she had spent decades working toward, having lived to see the Thirteenth Amendment ratified in 1865 and the subsequent Reconstruction era unfold. In her final years, she and Levi (who predeceased her in 1877) had continued to support formerly enslaved communities through organizations such as the Western Freedmen's Aid Society, focusing on education and material relief for freedpeople navigating the aftermath of slavery.

Multiple historical sources, including the Indiana Commission for Women and both the English and French Wikipedia entries on her life, corroborate May 22, 1881 as her date of death, though at least one local source lists May 25, 1881—a minor discrepancy attributable to the imprecision common in nineteenth-century record-keeping. She was buried in Cincinnati, and her legacy would go largely uncelebrated in mainstream historical narratives for over a century, overshadowed in early accounts by her husband Levi, before later scholarship and public history efforts restored recognition of her essential, co-equal role in their shared abolitionist work.