A Free Woman of Color Lectures on Prejudice and Morality, 1832

Maria Stewart was born in 1803 to free black parents in Hartford, Connecticut. Orphaned at an early age, she worked as a domestic for a white family until 1823, when she married James Stewart, who worked in Boston’s maritime trade and was active in local African-American affairs. Following her husband’s death, she fell under the tutelage of white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who published several essays of hers in his newspaper, The Liberator. Stewart’s essays and speeches combined a concern with moral education with racial activism. The first African-American woman publicly to address a mixed-race audience, Stewart called on all African Americans to uplift the race by uplifting themselves. Her message attracted some followers, but drew fire as well. Criticized by whites who rejected her abolitionism, she also faced the ire of some in Boston’s black community who thought that in publicly lecturing black men to work harder for equality this young woman had overstepped the bounds of acceptable female behavior. Disillusioned, Maria Stewart left Boston in 1833. Though she became an educator and continued for work for racial uplift, she never regained the prominence she had earned in the early 1830s.

I have heard much respecting the horrors of slavery; but may Heaven forbid that the generality of my color throughout these United States should experience any more of its horrors than to be a servant of servants, or hewers of wood and drawers of water! Tell us no more of southern slavery; for with few exceptions, although I may be very erroneous in my opinion, yet I consider our condition but little better than that. Yet, after all, methinks there are no chains so galling as the chains of ignorance--no fetters so binding as those that bind the soul, and exclude it from the vast field of useful and scientific knowledge. O, had I received the advantages of early education, my ideas would, ere now, have expanded far and wide. . . .

And such is the powerful force of prejudice. Let our girls possess what amiable qualities of soul they may; let their characters be fair and spotless as innocence itself; let their natural taste and ingenuity be what they may; it is impossible for scarce an individual of them to rise above the condition of servants. Ah! why is this cruel and unfeeling distinction? Is it merely because God has made our complexion to vary? If it be, O shame to soft, relenting humanity! . . . Yet, after all, methinks were the American free people of color to turn their attention more assiduously to moral worth and intellectual improvement, this would be the result: prejudice would gradually diminish, and the whites would be compelled to say, unloose those fetters! . . .

The whites have so long and so loudly proclaimed the theme of equal rights and privileges, that our souls have caught the flame also, ragged as we are. As far as our merit deserves, we feel a common desire to rise above the condition of servants and drudges. . . .

My beloved brethren, as Christ has died in vain for those who will not accept of offered mercy, so will it be vain for the advocates of freedom to spend their breath in our behalf, unless with united hearts and souls you make some mighty efforts to raise your sons, and daughters from the horrible state of servitude and degradation in which they are placed. . . . As the prayers and tears of Christians will avail the finally impenitent nothing; neither will the prayers and tears of the friends of humanity avail us any thing, unless we possess a spirit of virtuous emulation within our breasts. Did the pilgrims, when they first landed on these shores, quietly compose themselves, and say, "the Britons have all the money and all the power, and we must continue their servants forever?" Did they sluggishly sigh and say, "our lot is hard, the Indians own the soil, and we cannot cultivate it?" No; they first made powerful efforts to raise themselves and then God raised up those illustrious patriots Washington and Lafayette to assist and defend them. And, my brethren, have you made a powerful effort? Have you prayed the Legislature for mercy's sake to grant you all the rights and privileges of free citizens, that your daughters may raise to that degree of respectability which true merit deserves, and your sons above the servile situations which most of them fill?

Source: Maria W. Stewart, “Lecture Delivered At The Franklin Hall, Boston, September 21, 1832.”