Stewart, Maria W.

By: Rita Roberts

Source:

 American National Biography Online

Stewart, Maria W.

writer, black activist, and teacher, was born Maria Miller in Hartford, Connecticut (information about her date of birth and parentage is not known). Orphaned at five years old and indentured to a clergyman’s family until she was fifteen, Maria Miller supported herself as a domestic servant and gained a rudimentary education by attending “Sabbath schools.” Miller’s marriage on 10 August 1826 to James W. Stewart, a Boston shipping agent, placed her in the small and vibrant free black Boston community that had established organizations and institutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for northern blacks coming out of bondage. Stewart’s brief period of financial security ended when unscrupulous executors cheated the young widow out of her inheritance following the death of her husband in 1829.

Lacking family and funds, Stewart, who had no children, was forced to rely again on her own resources. In late 1820s the second series of evangelical revivals was sweeping across the country converting thousands of Americans to a more fervent and active Christian experience. Like many of her age, Stewart became “a humble instrument in the hands of God” to win “some poor souls to Christ.” She was also influenced by the increasingly aggressive activism of many Boston blacks who had organized, in 1826, the Massachusetts General Colored Association, an antislavery society that advocated the immediate abolition of slavery and supported the first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, published in New York City. David Walker, an outspoken member of the association, published a passionate manifesto called David Walker’s Appeal in September 1829. Walker’s call for African Americans, slave and free, to engage in the struggle against slavery and racism was combined with warnings to whites about the inevitability of a slave insurrection if slavery persisted. The Appeal greatly influenced Stewart. So, too, did Walker’s death six months after the demise of Stewart’s husband. Coupled with a conversion experience, it contributed to her belief that she was a divinely chosen advocate for the human rights of African Americans. Instilled with divine courage, she felt compelled to “sacrifice” her life “for the cause of God and my brethren.”

In 1831 Stewart began writing and in 1832 began giving public lectures to black Bostonians about their critical role in the movement for the abolition of slavery and racism. These political critiques complemented her religious writings, which stressed the importance of spirituality in the individual and the community. Her first essay, Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality (1831), as well as most of her other writings and speeches that followed, were published as pamphlets by white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison or appeared in The Liberator, Garrison’s antislavery newspaper. In 1832 she published Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart, a collection of her religious meditations, and in 1835 Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart, a compilation of her religious meditations and political essays.

Stewart’s religious writings revealed the degree to which she was immersed in the larger national and international evangelical community and showed the influence of developing traditions in black evangelicalism. Stewart stressed an immanent God engaged in the affairs of humankind. Also, like other evangelicals, she consistently noted her conversion as the signal event in her life and expressed her sense of “duty” to help convert nation and the world. She borrowed heavily from the Bible, as did other evangelicals of her era, sometimes using language almost verbatim from the King James version.

Unlike white Christians, Stewart reiterated a developing tradition within black Christianity that stressed an omnipotent God who was concerned about divine justice as much, if not more than, divine love. She conflated temporal and spiritual deliverance from the bondage of sin and slavery; the “cause of Christ” was the elimination of sin and the destruction of “the chains of slavery and ignorance.” Like so many African-American Christians, Stewart emphasized biblical evidence of human equality. She thanked God, for instance, that “thou art no respecter of persons” (Productions, 46). Thus, in discrete ways, Stewart’s sacred works were as political as they were religious.

Stewart’s political writings and speeches were a constant blend of the sacred and the secular. Indeed, she believed that Christianity was the foundation of political, social, and economic change; abolition, equal rights, and black unity depended upon African-American commitment to divine direction. While recognizing exceptions to her claims, she argued that men came under particular scrutiny because they were falling short in their decreed role as fathers, husbands, and community leaders. At the same time, Stewart reflected nineteenth-century gender roles in her admonitions to wives and mothers to ensure “moral worth and intellectual improvement” in the rising generation through exemplary piety and education. Knowledge equaled power, Stewart claimed, and was deeply intertwined with spiritual growth. Her stress on education expressed resentment and dismay about her own and other black children’s, especially young girls’, limited opportunities in the antebellum North. Restrictions on black education were analogous to limited employment opportunities. Stewart condemned whites in general for exploiting black labor (particularly domestic labor) because of self-interest.

Stewart consistently argued that black unity was critical in the struggle for abolition and equality. Troubled by what she perceived as “prejudices and animosities” among blacks, she insisted that blacks would never eradicate slavery, poverty, and ignorance until “we become united as one.” She advocated not only the establishment of black schools and churches but also separate black businesses. She urged African Americans to “unite and build a store” of their own and to “promote and patronize each other.” As the first American woman to deliver a public lecture about political subjects to both men and women, Stewart confronted strident opposition. Her passionate, and, at times, abrasive language, in so many ways similar to Walker’s, was unacceptable from a woman. While her widowhood allowed her a degree of autonomy that a single or married woman in the early nineteenth century lacked, Stewart was confronted with prevailing sexual proscriptions that relegated women to subordinate positions politically, economically, and socially. And prohibitions against women lecturing to men, especially about political and social issues, existed as much in the black community as in the dominant society. The negative responses to her often blunt directives to black audiences led to another “first.” She was the first African-American woman to deliver a lecture in defense of women’s rights.

Because of the increasing opposition against her and perhaps because of limited opportunities, Stewart moved to New York City. Before leaving Boston, she delivered a “Farewell Address” in 1833 in which she defended the right of women to play prominent roles in society. Citing biblical as well as historical examples, Stewart asserted that “women … in all ages … have had a voice in moral, religious and political subjects” (Richardson, p. 68). Having been called of God, she was merely fulfilling her divine duty: “What if I am a woman; is not the God of ancient times the God of these modern days?” (Richardson, p. 68). New York afforded Stewart the opportunity for more advanced education through her membership in the New York City black women’s Female Literary Society. While records show that she attended the Women’s Anti-Slavery Convention in 1837 and in 1850 was mentioned in the North Star as a member of the Committee of Arrangements to benefit the paper, Stewart dedicated most of the rest of her life to teaching. Beginning in the mid-1830s to the 1870s, she taught in New York, Brooklyn, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., public and private schools. In the early 1870s she combined teaching and work as matron of the Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, D.C.

In 1879 Stewart filed and won her claim for a widow’s pension from the U.S. Navy for her husband’s service. She used the money to publish a new edition of her writings and speeches to which she added an autobiographical account of her experiences during the Civil War. Meditations by Mrs. Maria W. Stewart appeared just eight months before she died in Washington, D.C.

Both as a writer and speaker, Stewart reflected and established the parameters, along with David Walker, of a developing tradition within black protest that persisted, in several ways, into the late twentieth century. The themes of unity, separate and collective action, community development, and an understanding of politics within an evangelical context were echoed by prominent nineteenth- and twentieth-century activists. Stewart’s rejection of the inferior status of black women and her assertion that black women must have a prominent role in the movement toward equality became fundamental in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century black feminist theory. As the forerunner of nineteenth-century black feminists like Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells, Stewart located the distinctiveness of black women’s oppression at the nexus of race and gender.

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