Attorney & general: Little sister's big day

Kate Stoneman became the first female lawyer in New York

 Twenty years after the Civil War, George Stoneman was the governor of California. Meanwhile, back in New York where the general was raised, his little sister Kate was making her own mark in the Statehouse.

 That’s why the Albany Law School celebrates March 27 as Kate Stoneman Day. Catharine “Kate” Stoneman was a longtime teacher who, in 1885, became the first woman to pass the bar exam in New York. Then she was banned by a three-judge panel who ruled that there “no precedent … and no necessity” for women to practice law—not unless the state legislature voted otherwise.

 Kate Stoneman immediately proved her legal skills by personally marshalling a bill through the legislature and convincing the governor to sign it, making it legal for women to practice law. On May 22, 1886, at age 45 she became the first woman admitted to the New York bar, and 12 years later she became the first female to officially graduate from the Albany Law School.
 Gen. Stoneman’s relationships with his sisters reveal a softer side of the hard-driving Yankee, whose troops terrorized parts of the Carolinas and Virginia during the closing days of the Civil War.

 Kate was only one year old when her brother George left their family home near Syracuse, N.Y., to enroll at West Point. Like two of her sisters, she grew up to become a teacher, specializing in geography, drawing, and penmanship. One of her brothers, John Stoneman, became a lawyer in 1855, and their youngest sister, Anna, married a lawyer. Kate was involved in the Women’s Suffrage Society and finally received the right to vote at age 77 in 1918. She died in 1925.

 Kate and her two older sisters, Kitty and Jennie, never married, and all of them spent time in California tutoring Gen. Stoneman’s children. Baby sister Anna Stoneman Williams took the general into her home in 1894, when his health was failing and he was estranged from his wife and children. Anna was a leader in the Christian Science community in Buffalo. It was at Anna’s house on 17 West Utica Street that George Stoneman died on Sept. 5, 1894 at age 72.

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THE NAME STONEMAN has been in the news lately in the aftermath of the tragic school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998), an author and environmentalist who became known as the "Grand Dame of the Everglades," was not related to the general, as far as I can tell. Gen. George Stoneman Jr. had four children and two grandchildren, but his family name died out with his grandson, George Stoneman IV (1906-1988), a Navy veteran of World War II.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas did have some famous relatives who figure in the fringes of our story. She was a distant cousin of pioneering country musicians Ernest “Pops” Stoneman (1893-1968) and George Washington Stoneman (1882-1966). They were from Carroll County, Virginia, which was raided by Gen. Stoneman's cavalry on the way from Hillsville and Wytheville to Christiansburg. Given Gen. Stoneman's reputation nowadays, it seems surprising that a family in this part of Virginia would name their son George Stoneman just 17 years after the raid. Perhaps they were Union sympathizers, like many mountain families.