Susan Mansfield was the daughter of the Rev. Achilles Mansfield, of Killingworth, Connecticut, and was born on the twenty-seventh of January, 1791. At the age of eighteen or nineteen, she was married to Joshua Huntington, pastor of the Old South church, Boston. She died in 1823. Her memoirs, written by her husband's pastoral successor, B. B. Wisner, was, at one time, a very popular work. It passed through five editions in Scotland, in a very few years.

Her husband preceded her to the grave four years. While a widow, she was robbed of several articles of jewelry by a young woman; and the articles were recovered, and the thief arrested and tried. During the examination, Mrs. Huntington was called into court to identify the property; and having done this, she was asked their value. Knowing that the degree of punishment depended somewhat on the apprisal of the property, and pitying the poor girl, she hinted that she never used much jewelry, and was not a good judge of its value. A person was then called upon to prize the several articles; and she told him to bear in mind that they had been used for many years, were consequently damaged, and out of fashion. In this way she secured a low and, to herself, a satisfactory valuation. She then addressed the judge, stating that she had herself taken the jewelry from a trunk; had carelessly left it exposed on a table; had thus thrown temptation in the way of the girl, and suggested that her own heedlessness might possibly have been the cause of the offence. She did not, she assured the judge, wish to interfere with his duties, or wrongly bias his decisions, but she would, nevertheless, esteem it a favor, if the punishment inflicted on the unfortunate transgressor, could be the lightest that would not dishonor the law. Hoping the ignorant girl would repent and reform, she left the stand with tears in her eyes, which greatly affected the judge. In his sentence he reminded the culprit, that the person whom she had most offended, was the first to plead for a mitigation of her punishment, and had saved her from the extreme rigors of a broken law.