Mary Coffin Johnson

Mary Coffin Johnson (, Coffin; July 15, 1834 – August 10, 1928) was an American temperance activist and writer. She was the publisher of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union's (WCTU) first newspaper, The Union Signal. Johnson was acquainted with Abraham Lincoln, and was a friend of Henry Ward Beecher and his wife Eunice. July 15, 1834. Her parents, Elijah (a banker) Her activities in Brooklyn included holding prayer-meetings throughout the city, visiting the saloons and appealing to the saloon-keepers, as well as distributing literature. She also was a leader in the campaign waged by the Union which secured the closing of the 3,000 saloons in that city on Sunday, on the strength of an obsolete statute which had been revived by the temperance women. She addressed temperance meetings in Brooklyn, Ossining, Round lance, New York, at Orchard Beach and Lake Sebago, Maine, at Ocean Grove, New Jersey, and elsewhere, and in churches in many of the Eastern cities.

In 1876, Johnson went to England where she held drawing-room temperance meetings, addressing 150 such gatherings during the year. In 1879, she again toured England, also extending her work to North Ireland. She was the first American woman to go abroad in temperance work, and owing to her success, she in 1879, resigned her office in the National WCTU, to continue her endeavors in the foreign field.

Death Johnson broke her leg after falling in her home, and died three months later at the Harbor Sanitarium, Manhattan, August 10, 1928.

Selected works Gospel Temperance Songs (with Eli Johnson) The Higleys and their ancestry. An old colonial family, 1892 Genealogical studies, 1895 Biographical sketches of the Rambos of America, 1914 M. Morris White, 1830–1913, 1917 Charles F. Coffin, a Quaker pioneer, 1923