Post-war Career
In 1866, Abbott resigned from service to the Union Army and returned to Canada. He attended primary medical classes at the University of Toronto the following year. While he did not graduate, he established a medical practice and was admitted to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario in 1871. In an Anglican wedding ceremony in Toronto on 9 August 1871, he married Mary Ann Casey, the 18-year-old daughter of a successful black barber. Abbott and his wife moved to Chatham were he resumed his medical practice. They eventually had three daughters and two sons.
Like his father, Abbott soon became an important member of the black community in Toronto. From 1873 to 1880, he fought against racially segregated schools as president of the Wilberforce Educational Institute and was appointed coroner for Kent County, Ontario in 1874, the first Black man to hold that office. Abbott contributed to a local newspaper, the Chatham Planet, and was associate editor of the Messenger, the journal of the local British Methodist Episcopal Church. Abbott was made president of both the Chatham Literary and Debating Society and the Chatham Medical Society in 1878. Abbott moved his medical practice to Dundas, Ontario in 1881. In 1883 he became a trustee of that community's high school and was chairman of the town’s internal management committee from 1885 to 1889. He also worked as an administrator for the Dundas Mechanics' Institute.
The family moved to Oakville, Ontario in 1889 but returned to Toronto the following year. He was elected a member of the local post of the Grand Army of the Republic and one of 273 Civil War veterans in Toronto to wear the badge of that fraternity. He was then known as "Captain Abbott", a rank which might reflect his office within the Grand Army of the Republic rather than his actual rank during the American Civil War. In November 1892, Abbott was appointed aide-de-camp “on the Staff of the Commanding Officers Dept.” of New York. A source of great pride for Abbott and his family, this was the highest military honour ever bestowed on a black person in Canada or the United States.
In 1894, Abbott was appointed surgeon-in-chief at Provident Hospital in Chicago, the first training hospital for black nurses in the United States. He became the hospital's medical superintendent In 1896 but resigned the following year. Returning to Toronto, Abbott resumed his private practice and became more involved with writing for various publications including the Colored American Magazine of Boston and New York, the Anglo-American Magazine of London (for which he wrote “Some recollections of Lincoln’s assassination"), and New York Age. Medicine, Black history, the Civil War, Darwinism, biology, and poetry were among his topics.
Read more about this topic: Anderson Ruffin Abbott
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