She was placed in school in the Emmitsburg, Maryland, convent, and later, in the Convent of the Visitation Nuns in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., where she passed the last years of the civil war. During the last year of the war, and, with a group of convent girls, she witnesed from a balcony the closing review of the Grand Army, whose ranks contained four of her brothers. She was with her father in Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., when President Lincoln was shot. She was then sent to Howland College, Springport, New York, a school conducted under Quaker patronage.