After various failed commercial enterprises and the split with his wife Mathilde (who became an eminent figure in the U.S. abolitionist and suffrage movements, and who lived together with the American feminist and writer Mary Booth from 1860 until Booth's death in 1865), Fritz moved to Chicago, where he died on Sunday night 8. December 1872, after an accident. The short-sighted Anneke had fallen into a construction pit. Lighting was very bad in Chicago in those days, and the city was, one year after the Great Chicago Fire, full of such pits.