Sarah's brother Thomas went to Yale Law School in 1805. During his visits back home, Thomas continued teaching Sarah new ideas about the dangers of Enlightenment and the importance of religion. (Thomas died young, and was described in an obituary as most proud of his piety.) These ideas, combined with her secret studies of the law, gave her some of the basis for her later work as an activist. Her father told her that if she had been a man, she would have been the greatest lawyer in South Carolina. Lerner gives a somewhat different version, in which her father said "she would have made the greatest jurist in the country." Sarah believed her inability to get higher education was unfair. She wondered at the behavior of her family and neighbors, who encouraged slaves to be baptized and to attend worship services, but did not consider them true brothers and sisters in faith.