Ransom entered political life as a Whig and campaigned for Winfield Scott in 1852. With the party's disintegration as a national organization and the Know Nothings' rise to the fore, however, Ransom aligned himself with the Democrats and served as Northampton County's representative in the North Carolina House of Commons between 1858 and 1861. Like many in his state, he remained unenthusiastic about secession until conflict became inevitable.

During the Civil War she traveled to the United States to help recruit soldiers for the Union army. In 1869, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, by now a widow, moved to Washington, D.C., with her two children. Later, she lived with her older daughter, Sarah E. Cary Evans, a schoolteacher. Between 1869 and 1871 she began her studies in law at Howard University but stopped for unknown reasons. She resumed her studies in 1881 and received her degree in 1883, the only black woman in a class of five, although there is no evidence that she actually practiced law.

Mary Ann Shadd continued her family's activist tradition by devoting her life to the advancement of black education and the immediate abolition of slavery. As a youth she attended a private Quaker school for blacks taught by whites, in which several of her teachers were abolitionists. During the 1840s she taught in schools for blacks in Wilmington, West Chester, New York City, and Norristown, Pennsylvania.

Although the eldest of thirteen children, Mary Ann Shadd grew up in comfortable economic circumstances. Little is known about her mother except that she was born in North Carolina in 1806 and was of mixed black and white heritage; whether she was born free or a slave is unknown. Shadd's father was also of mixed-race heritage. His paternal grandfather, Jeremiah Schadd, was a German soldier who had fought in the American Revolution and later married Elizabeth Jackson, a free black woman from Pennsylvania.