Chapter 1
DAUGHTERS OF AFRICA, AWAKE!
In 1827, any Black woman who considered stepping into the limelight of politics was on notice. She risked family, friends, and reputation. As the editors of the African American weekly Freedom’s Journal put it: “A woman who would attempt to thunder with her tongue, would not find her eloquence increase her domestic happiness. A man, in a furious passion, is terrible to his enemies; but a woman, in a passion, is disgusting to her friends; she loses all that respect due to her sex, and she has not masculine strength and courage to enforce any other kind of respect.”1
For all the fury that ran through their writing, the men who ran the country’s first Black newspaper knew that their words were too little and too late. In their midst were women who were coming out of slavery and servitude and into their own. Some felt called by God; others were raised to serve the collective good. All of them were prepared to push back against anyone who deemed them merely men’s helpmeets. The daughters of Africa were awake and ready to break new ground.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION ushered in an antislavery moment in the United States. This war that transformed slaves into soldiers also promoted revolutionary ideals about the equality of all. The conflict settled in 1783 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris and an affirmation that the new United States was independent of British rule. Black Americans already aimed to test the principles so eloquently set forth in the Declaration of Independence. The wartime troubling of slavery’s bonds meant that newly free Black people could claim a place in American political culture. Men and women of African descent, at liberty to work, build families, and chart their collective futures, posed the most vexed questions the young nation would have to answer.2
Abolition was not a distant aspiration. When Northern states began to make slavery illegal, African Americans did their part to encourage the change. In Massachusetts during the 1780s, for example, Quok Walker and Elizabeth Freeman were among those enslaved people who challenged their bonds in court, arguing that the state constitution guaranteed equal rights to all. They won; slavery in Massachusetts was abolished through a cluster of court decisions. In other states, notably Pennsylvania and New York, legislators adopted abolition laws that planned for slavery’s demise gradually over time: abolition was achieved in 1838 in Pennsylvania and in 1827 in New York.3
Communities of free people grew out of this northern abolition. However, the meaning of freedom was not settled. Some political leaders foresaw a future in which the United States was a white man’s country. They promoted colonization, schemes that aimed to remove or relocate former slaves from the United States to the Caribbean, West Africa, or elsewhere. Beginning in 1816, the American Colonization Society and its local affiliates raised funds, dispatched recruiters, outfitted ships, and founded colonies such as Liberia. They offered land and political rights to those Black Americans who agreed to leave the country. Few people accepted colonizationists’ enticements. Instead, free men and women insisted upon staying in the United States to make their lives in the place of their birth.4
With freedom came mobility, at least as far as a coach, ferry, or simply two legs might go. Those who up and went often headed toward something: a job, a loved one, or the streets of a fabled city. Others fled, leaving behind the lash, patrols, and men who believed them free in name only. Chance at a better life might have come in the form of another farm across the county, better wages at a workshop across town, possession of a small patch of dirt, or the warmth of a basement room with a door that shut out the world. For many former slaves, the best opportunities were in cities. In the growing urban spaces of the late eighteenth century lay the possibility of work for wages, a hard-knocks education, and, above all else, the safety offered by numbers.5
It is remarkable how quickly Black migrants began to remake cities in their own visions. Their food, clothes, ways of speaking, styles of dance, music, and general sociability became part of what Americans expected of cities. They became Bostonians, New Yorkers, and Baltimoreans, though often with a qualifier—Black, African, or colored—affixed. They began to build, first families and then quickly institutions that made up a new African American public culture. Churches, fraternal orders, mutual aid societies, political clubs, libraries, and guilds sprung up and took root in a way that signaled Black Americans were here to stay. They intended to be fully American.6
These beginnings were uneasy. Law and custom mixed with intimidation and violence to promote the racism that had been woven into the nation’s fabric long before the heady years of the Revolution. City leaders closed doors, drew lines, and erected barriers that they hoped would lead free Black Americans to leave the country altogether. A debate brewed, one in which Americans sharply disagreed about the status of former slaves: If they were free, were they also equal? If they were citizens, did they also possess rights? How deeply and indelibly would the color line be etched into the life of the nation? Everyone heard these questions as clear as a church bell and as regular as hoofbeats on cobblestones. Black Americans set out to answer them, in word and in deed.7
The birth of Black political culture was linked to the troubles wrought by racism. The weight of discrimination was counterbalanced by the pride of self-making. Black institutions boasted of their superior commitment to ideals such as equality. They held themselves up as beacons of the new nation’s potential: it could reject the holding of persons as property and erase the color line from the landscape of freedom. Racism met its first endings among these communities of former slaves.8
Winning broader freedoms demanded backbreaking effort. Money was scarce, political power slight, and the visibility that came with public life attracted danger and even retribution from villains who hoped to keep former slaves subordinate. The effort required the contributions of all—men, women, and children—and their labors extended from digging trenches and laying bricks to raising preachers’ salaries and teaching young pupils with too few primers or slates. Tensions within Black communities developed along lines of education, class, and status and most acutely between those who remained committed to demanding rights in the United States and those who took off for new lands—Haiti, Liberia, and Canada West—where they might find fewer obstacles on their road to freedom.
Political rights—the vote, jury service, office holding—were one key to winning lasting equality. Unable to make the laws that regulated their communities, Black Americans faced a disadvantage. Sometimes white lawmakers might favor them out of benevolence or self-interest. But African Americans did not write the laws that governed their lives. They had little say about how taxes were allocated, and struggled in courts to protect their property and persons. By the 1820s, local memories of the days when Black men had once voted had faded. States like New Jersey, Maryland, and New York had cut Black men’s access to the polls, and new states like Ohio and Missouri made “white” a prerequisite for voting in their founding constitutions. The injustice of this shift was underscored when, at the same moment, more and more white men were voting than ever before: states lifted the property qualifications and literacy tests that had once kept many of them from the polls.9
Though marginalized, Black Americans did not abandon politics. By the 1830s, activists built a “colored” convention movement, and though the term “colored” may strike twenty-first-century ears as racist, in the nineteenth century it was a preferred term among Black activists. The conventions brought together Black men and some women to debate the issues of the day and organize. The first gathering met in 1830 Philadelphia, where delegates from Maine to Maryland started a tradition that would continue for decades. Convention goers discussed big questions, including civil rights, the building of schools, and the value of every person’s labor. Nearby, in Black churches, faith blended with politics when congregations turned their sanctuaries into convention halls, debated church politics, and organized against second-class treatment in white-led houses of worship. These were the earliest years of radical abolitionism and Black Americans worked alongside white allies to bring about the immediate end to human bondage.10
Black women participated in this new public culture, but they faced narrow ideas about who they could be and what they could do. Most men expected women to assist with building the community while also remaining subordinate. Men welcomed women as helpmeets who saw to the material needs of ministers, delegates, and lecturers. They encouraged women to raise funds that built houses of worship, published meeting minutes, and kept newspapers afloat. Men also expected women to take charge of families, and ensure the well-being of children, elders, and the vulnerable. All the while, most Black women also worked, as laundresses, housekeepers, nannies, boardinghouse keepers, nurses, and seamstresses. They brought home critically necessary dollars and cents. Among them were women who yearned for more, women who wanted to lead.11
Some women, at first just a few, began to question the limits imposed upon them, testing the waters. They did not aim to upset a fragile world, one in which everyone—men, women, and children—were bound together in the same struggle for spiritual, material, and political well-being. It was not yet time to speak about women’s rights, or anything as distant as the vote, when even few Black men were able to cast ballots. Still, some women promoted the idea that their talents, their ambitions, and the needs of the community demanded that they also take control of podiums, pamphlets, and meeting halls.12
BLACK WOMEN’S SUGGESTION that they were more than helpmeets did not go over easily. People sparred verbally in church sanctuaries and meeting halls. Discussions erupted on street corners and at family meals. On the pages of Black newspapers, editors ensured that competing views about women, their purpose, and their power got a good airing. The printed word, whether read silently or out loud, knit together communities of Black Americans across far-flung towns and cities, and it reached the most rural outposts, even if that took a bit longer. Starting in 1827, the pages of Freedom’s Journal served as a virtual town hall. There, African Americans discovered women who believed they should be part of community building and the quest for the equality and dignity that citizenship promised. They also learned that some leading men opposed any such change.
Anxiety about women leapt from the paper’s columns as former slaves from Maine to Maryland and from New York to Pittsburgh opened Freedom’s Journal. From their desks in New York City, the editors promoted literacy and civic education while condemning slavery and racism. The timing of its debut, spring 1827, was auspicious. New York planned to abolish slavery on July 4 of that year. The paper fancied itself a primer on many things, including how women should contribute to life in freedom. At least, that’s what its editors hoped. Their views were conventional. In its earliest articles, Freedom’s Journal painted a portrait of a well-ordered Black society in which men and women were guided by their so-called innate and differing qualities. The paper deemed women helpmeets who possessed grace, piousness, virtue, modesty, gentility, and peaceableness, qualities that the editors urged would counterbalance the wild excesses of men. In all things, however, women should remain subservient companions.13
The editors hoped that their words—set with the authority of type, printed with ink, and circulated on the pages of a respected newspaper—would carry weight. Women might then accept limits imposed upon them in streets, salons, and sanctuaries. Sometimes it worked. In 1828, men and women founded the African Dorcas Society to promote the education of New York City’s poorest Black schoolchildren. They named the society for a woman, Dorcas, who in the New Testament is celebrated for her good works and acts of love for the poor. But the founders put in charge an advisory board made up exclusively of men, including ministers and Freedom’s Journal editor Samuel Cornish. These men encouraged women’s work, but not their leadership.14
Just as often, however, Black women demonstrated how old ideas would not curb their public lives. Women zealously pursued educational opportunities. Among pupils at the New York African Mutual Instruction Society in 1828, for example, young women outnumbered men. Women also turned out at political meetings. At a New Haven, Connecticut, anticolonization meeting—organized to oppose migration to Liberia—Black women made up the majority of the crowd and even earned praise for their “spirit of enquiry.” But these same scenes dismayed others: If women dominated school desks or church pews, might they want to also command the podium and the pulpit?15
Women’s activism made the editors of Freedom’s Journal uneasy. It upset their vision for a male-led society. Studiously, they itemized for readers examples how women openly defied limits, discomfortingly so. Many offenders were white women, such as Frances Wright, the Scottish-born journalist, utopian, and antislavery figure; Harriet Livermore, the first woman to preach in the House of Representatives chamber; and a Mrs. Miler, who was noted as a Methodist preacher and “but 22 years of age.” The trouble extended beyond the United States. One report noted that as many as sixty Canadian women had voted in the fall of 1827, an alarmingly high number, according to Freedom’s Journal. The paper overstated the quantity of ballots cast by women in Lower Canada—it was likely no more than three—but the exaggeration underscored how the specter of women at the polls unsettled the editors. Women gave men reason to patrol the boundaries of public authority.16
Suspicion surrounded Black women who rejected conventional roles. Commentators derided breaches of propriety, while praising those women who remained “modest and unpresuming” and committed to the “gentler virtues” of their sex. Freedom’s Journal openly chastised its women readers, wagging a finger at those who risked sacrificing the privileges of womanhood. The editors’ words revealed an awkward truth. As Black communities faced the burdens of freedom, they depended on women’s work: Women raised funds and distributed essential goods. They built structures and paid salaries. They filled pews and benches and purchased newspapers and tracts. But what if women were not restricted to these roles? They might also upset a social order that men expected to govern.17
Women’s passions troubled men. So too did their words. When a correspondent to Freedom’s Journal we know only as Matilda took up a pen to write on women’s education, her tone was mocking and confrontational. She explained that the paper’s editors had overlooked this important subject and she challenged: “I hope you are not to be classed with those, who think that [women’s] mathematical knowledge should be limited to ‘fathoming the dish-kettle,’ and that we have acquired enough of history, if we know that our grandfather’s father lived and died.” Such thinking, Matilda asserted, was past its time: “We have minds that are capable and deserving of culture.” Women’s responsibilities included the raising of boys into men and shouldering a “duty to store their daughters’ minds with useful learning.” The editors offered no retort, leaving Matilda’s voice to stand alone.18
BLACK CHURCHES WERE places of spiritual refuge and sustenance, but organizing them involved politics. Church law structured religious leadership. It set the terms of decision-making and detailed rituals. But even among those who shared a faith, disputes were common. Black Americans got caught up in disagreements over property, money, music, and who should hold the keys to the sanctuary. Always, these troubles revolved around power. They generated factions, schisms, and splits and exposed differences over what made Black churches distinct and necessary. Women also created friction when they made noise about how the role of helpmeet unfairly limited their power.
Jarena Lee, as she later came to be known, did not initially intend to upend power in her church. As a young woman, she first asked questions about her spiritual mission: the genuineness of her calling, the correctness of her biblical interpretation, and her capacity to convert souls. And yet she could not pose such questions without also bumping into the limits that womanhood placed on her purpose. Young Jarena, whose family name we do not know, came of age in a Christian world that believed in the perfectibility of human beings and the rejection of man-made distinctions between people. She underwent a conversion and arrived at a life-defining insight: she would give in to a calling from God and preach. Trouble arose, of course, when that divine purpose led Jarena to speak with authority on spiritual matters and do so in public. Since the 1760s, Black women who preached had provoked alarm about religious and sexual “disorder,” but generally these women did not challenge their formal subordination. When Jarena rejected all limits placed upon her work, she introduced something altogether new.19
Jarena lived a humble early life. She was born in Cape May, New Jersey, in 1783, just at the end of the American Revolution. As best we can know, she was born free, even as slavery remained legal and not uncommon in the southern part of the state. Situated between New York and Delaware, New Jersey did not begin to abolish slavery until 1804, and some people would remain enslaved there until the post–Civil War abolition of 1865. For Jarena, being free did not mean that she was wholly at liberty. She was bound out as a servant at a young age, just seven years old, robbing her of a childhood. Her liberation story began years later, at the age of twenty-one, when Jarena converted to Christianity. As an adult, she was excused from the harsh obligations of apprenticeship, and she was free, as an eager new Christian, to experiment with what it meant to be spiritually unbound.20
Jarena struggled, and her troubles centered on the condition of her soul rather than on the status of her womanhood. Her religious journey went from self-doubt, despair, and contemplation of suicide to time spent searching for a home in the Presbyterian, Catholic, and Anglican faiths. Finally, she was moved to conversion in Philadelphia’s young African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Signs that Jarena would not be a conventional adherent to the faith surfaced early on, first in her exuberant worship style—one that mixed prayer with passionate tears and even fevers—and then in her striving for sanctification, a perfection on earth that went beyond traditional Methodist teachings. Jarena was, from the start, ambitious, even excessive.21
In 1811, four or five years after joining the AME Church, Jarena “distinctly heard, and most certainly understood” a voice that insisted that she “go preach the Gospel.” She was being called, though she was not certain by whom. Perhaps it was Satan. She asked God for a sign, and witnessing a vision convinced Jarena that she was on a righteous path. Even while sleeping, she practiced, waking herself and her household with late-night preaching. Jarena wrestled with an urge to tell her local minister, Richard Allen, of her calling but then hesitated, a sign of just how inflammatory her ambition was. Not the first woman to speak publicly about the scriptures, she was among the very first to seek the formal approval of her church.22
Thus began a many-decades-long fight for Jarena. And the stakes were high. The AME Church was navigating a delicate separation from the white-led Methodist Episcopal Church, which would not ordain Black ministers and bishops and refused to transfer the ownership of church property to Black congregations. The movement for an independent Black church was centered in Philadelphia. It galvanized the city’s growing free Black community that included veterans of the Revolutionary War and many people who had gained their freedom through gradual abolition laws. Allen, leader of Jarena’s congregation, would go on to become the sect’s head bishop. He was an experienced minister committed to safeguarding the future of his religious community.
Was Jarena, a preaching woman, an asset or a threat to this new Black Methodism? Allen initially tried to duck the question, doubting that Jarena’s calling was genuine. The two went back and forth privately. Allen knew of another case, that of a Mrs. Cook of the Methodist Church, who had similar ambitions. Cook had been an effective exhorter—a religious speaker who did not interpret the scriptures—and had led class meetings during which new converts studied the Bible. Allen valued the talents of women like Cook and Jarena, but he doubted that church law permitted him to license them as preachers. He hoped that Jarena would accept a more limited role in which she preached occasionally with the permission of her local minister.23
Jarena tried to live within the bounds of this compromise. She married AME minister Joseph Lee, whom she followed to his parish in Snow Hill, New Jersey. The town was not a good fit for the new Mrs. Lee, and she mourned the loss of her Philadelphia friends, who now lived ten miles away across the Delaware River. Lee was generally ill, and whether the cause was her body or her mind, or both, is hard to say. She bore two children and endured the loneliness and frustration that life as a minister’s wife imposed. Then, six years into their marriage, Lee’s husband died. Although she suffered, as she later recalled, she was also free to return to the spiritual “fire” that had been suppressed when she played the ill-suited role of minister’s wife.24
Lee returned to Philadelphia and Bishop Allen’s sanctuary, which had become the leading house of worship in the new AME denomination. There, she hoped to find a middle ground that might fulfill her calling and at the same time keep the denomination from veering too far from the limits that Methodists—Black and white—placed upon women’s authority. All that changed, though not exactly by design, when Lee attended the sermon of a guest minister, a Rev. Richard Williams. She followed along as Williams preached “Salvation is of the Lord.” At one moment, the minister “seemed to have lost the spirit.” He faltered. Lee in turn “sprang” to action, moved by a “supernatural impulse, to her feet.” She then, standing in her pew, delivered an impromptu sermon that explained how she, like the Bible’s Jonah, had been kept away from her true calling. It was nothing short of an audition. As Lee sat down, Allen rose and declared that her call to preach was as genuine as that of any minister present.25
That day launched Lee’s preaching career. Over the next thirty years, she measured her efforts by miles traveled and sermons delivered. In 1827, she covered 2,325 miles and delivered 178 sermons. Ten years later, in 1837, she preached 146 times and rode just shy of 1,000 miles. She was nothing short of tireless, but she also had to be fearless, especially when journeying alone or in the company of other women. She attracted converts, old and new, from Maine to Virginia and from Long Island to Ohio. She spoke to Black Americans, enslaved and free, and to white audiences that included doubters, the curious, nonbelievers, and even slaveholders. Lee stood up in camp meetings, in small Black houses of worship, and many times in a town’s largest hall. She regularly accompanied Bishop Allen and the AME Church leadership to conferences, where she preached to those who might have doubted her right to do so but who nevertheless could not deny her power.26
Lee regularly provoked a question: Did a woman have the right to preach? “Troubles” surfaced in Salem, West Jersey, “from the elder, who like many others, was averse to a woman’s preaching.” In nearby Woodstown, a church elder “said he did not believe that ever a soul was converted under the preaching of a woman.” And yet, when Lee’s visit finished, the two shook hands in a concession of sorts. In Milford, Maryland, she arrived by invitation, knowing that preaching women had already generated objections there. In Reading, Pennsylvania, Lee encountered Rev. James Ward, who was “so prejudiced” that he would not “let me in his pulpit to speak.” Ward was later, according to Lee, rightly “turned out” of the church. In Princeton, New Jersey, local ministers banded together to stop her from preaching there at all.27
Bishop Allen’s support mattered. Anticipating Lee’s arrival in Pittsburgh, for example, a local minister sent a letter ahead that aimed to stop her from preaching. In response, Lee waved her “License from the Bishop, with his own signature,” as her authority. She ultimately succeeded, converting souls while also changing minds. A local church activist in Chillicothe, Ohio, started out opposing Lee’s visit, but witnessing her preach led him to conclude that “God was no respecter of persons, and that a woman as well as a man, when called of God, had a right to preach.” Sometimes ministers closed church doors to her, but Lee was resourceful and willing to speak in market houses, barns, private homes, and courthouses. But back in Philadelphia, when Bishop Allen proposed she take the pulpit in their home congregation, “opposition arose among the people against the propriety of female preaching.”28
A woman’s right to preach turned out to be more than incidental to Lee’s work. Her rights as a woman fused with her divine calling. Lee briefly stepped away from the pulpit in the 1830s, just long enough to put pen to paper. What emerged was one part hard-learned lessons and one part manifesto on churchwomen’s power. In 1836, the first edition of her spiritual memoir Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee appeared: a thousand self-published pamphlets formed a new front in Lee’s campaign for rights. She put the question plainly: “Why should it be thought impossible, heterodox, or improper, for a woman to preach?” The answer, in her view, lay not with men but instead with the wonder of the divine and in the unequivocal authority of the Bible: “For as unseemly as it may appear now a days for a woman to preach, it should be remembered that nothing is impossible with God… did not Mary, a woman, preach the Gospel?”29
Doubters needed only to witness her at work to be convinced. Lee explained: “I have frequently found families who told me that they had not for several years been to a meeting, and yet, while listening to hear what God would say by his poor coloured female instrument, have believed with trembling—tears rolling down their cheeks, the signs of contrition and repentance towards God.” Lee’s moving successes demonstrated that women could transform the lives of individual believers. Did they also have the power to alter the institutions they called home? The framing of Lee’s tract suggested yes, and its pages circulated along with their author, from churches to revivals and camp meetings. The rights of women preachers were women’s rights.30
THE PULPIT AND the podium were companion venues in the early nineteenth century, and many Black men moved easily between the two. To command the podium, same as the pulpit, was to wield the power of persuasion. Orators stood in meeting halls and open groves, their voices booming, reaching the ears of hundreds and thousands for whom public oratory served as news, entertainment, and politics—all wrapped up in soaring speeches. Audiences did not always act orderly or attentive. Public speakers, especially reformers, could expect hecklers, lobbed tomatoes, and even rowdy mobs. Words mattered, but so did the person giving them voice. Speakers were sized up for their style of elocution, demeanor, dress, and experience, all of which contributed to how seriously their audiences took them. Listeners also judged orators by the company they kept and the venues that welcomed them. If a person of ideas hoped to influence others, they would sooner or later have to step to a platform or up on a box and project their voice. What might happen next no one could say with certainty.
Maria Miller Stewart discovered how risky taking the podium could be. Her outward appearance and her inner force did not match up. Abolitionist and editor William Lloyd Garrison described Stewart on the eve of her debut as a public speaker: “You.… were in not the flush and promise of a ripening womanhood, with a graceful form and a pleasing countenance.” This modest portrait was at odds with the fiery prose that burned on Stewart’s pages: “I am sensible of exposing myself to calumny and reproach; but shall I, for fear of scoffs and frowns, refrain my tongue? Ah, no!” Stewart and Garrison struck a deal, and he agreed to publish her first book, Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality. Stewart’s ideas, like those of the men who edited Freedom’s Journal, would soon circulate in print.31
Politics ran high in Stewart’s hometown of Boston by the late 1820s. The city was a wellspring of radical antislavery activism and a crossroads for writers, orators, organizers, and agitators, all committed to converting Americans to the slave’s cause. Within this group, Stewart forged her public identity, starting in print and then moving to the podium. She was the first American woman to address an audience of both men and women on politics. Long before women’s conventions became regular occasions, Stewart broke that barrier. But she paid the price for doing so.32
Nothing about her early life destined Stewart to make her mark as a lecturer. Hardship had defined her younger years. At five, in Hartford, Connecticut, Maria Miller lost her parents, which left her vulnerable to exploitation, kidnapping, and sale into a domestic slave trade that trafficked people between the free North and the slaveholding South. She was “bound out” to the family of a local minister and lived a quasi-freedom in which, by necessity, she was coerced to give up her labor.33
She learned a hard lesson about racism and inequality. So-called indenture contracts formalized tough bargains. Children without guardians or means of support traded their labor for food, shelter, clothing, and the promise of training or some education. Maria’s work, at a tender age, involved attending to the needs of her contract holder and his household. She might have aided her mistress or the staff in the everyday tasks of cleaning and cooking. In a city like Hartford, she may have run errands or helped tend a small, urban garden plot. Perhaps she was a companion to white children. In contrast, Maria would have seen her own youth quickly wither and harden into early adulthood while her companions enjoyed the privilege of innocence and play.34
At twenty-three, Maria stood before Rev. Thomas Paul to be married. Liberated from her indenture contract, she had migrated from Hartford north and east to Boston. There, she met and agreed to wed James W. Stewart, a somewhat older man who, after serving in the US Navy and being held as a prisoner during the War of 1812, had succeeded as a shipping agent at Boston’s bustling port. The two stood together in the African Meeting House, a building that symbolized the aspirations of the city’s Black Baptist community. The skilled hands of Black Bostonians had raised the church frame and the funds to complete the project, and the meeting hall had opened in 1806. Its elegant façade incorporated the townhouse design of the Boston architect Asher Benjamin. And though it began as a place for educational and religious activities such as the Stewarts’ wedding, it also hosted public celebrations, political conventions, and antislavery meetings. As Maria and James wove together their lives, a bigger community wove the two into its fabric.35
Black Bostonians earned notoriety with their organizing at the African Meeting House. In 1829, David Walker, a member of the Massachusetts General Colored Association and an agent for Freedom’s Journal, published an incendiary pamphlet: Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles, Together with Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World. A used clothing dealer by day, by night Walker honed a manifesto that condemned slavery, upbraided Christians who supported bondage, railed against white supremacy, and, most provocatively, advocated open rebellion against slavery with the refrain “kill or be killed.” Southern states labeled Walker’s pamphlet so dangerous that they suppressed its distribution, arresting sailors who carried it into port. They condemned the text as seditious and even offered a reward for the delivery of Walker, dead or alive.36
Stewart likely knew Walker and had read his Appeal. But in those same months of 1829, she focused her concerns elsewhere. Her husband of just three years had died suddenly. He had provided for her, leaving Stewart and his children with cash, property, and household goods that should have sustained them. But, one after another, James Stewart’s business associates filed suits that claimed debts unpaid and contracts unfulfilled. They brought their claims before sympathetic courts and pressed them against a widow who was inexperienced and without counsel. They targeted a young grieving woman, aiming to wrest control of James Stewart’s estate using subterfuge and persistence. After a two-year legal battle, which she lost, Stewart slowly pieced together a new life.37
It was not easy: “For several years my heart was in continual sorrow,” Stewart wrote. First, she needed work. She began to teach, a vocation that would sustain her for years to come. She also turned to the church, where she found consolation through a newly discovered faith: “I found that religion was full of benevolence; I found there was joy and peace in believing.” Then Stewart did the unexpected. She stepped out from the shadows of home life and picked up where David Walker had left off after his own untimely death. She commanded a quill and inscribed hot words onto paper, awakening the consciousness of men and women, Black and white, to the evils of racism. She must have written by candlelight, in the late hours after her workday ended. If she confided her ambition to anyone, no record of it exists. Stewart channeled her grief and anger into prose that rocked Black Boston, and she immediately became a household name.38
Stewart wrote expressly to Black Americans, former slaves who faced the challenges that racism imposed in Boston and beyond. She rebuked them, making the case that they would never rise to their best if they did not reform: “Never, no, never will the chains of slavery and ignorance burst, till we become united as one, and cultivate among ourselves the pure principles of piety, morality, and virtue.” She issued a steep challenge. Her readers, she urged, held the future of Black America in their hands. On the front lines of their liberation Black Americans must master themselves.39
Stewart did not spare Black women from criticism, even though she knew that sexism multiplied their burdens: “Oh, ye daughters of Africa, awake! Awake! Arise! No longer sleep nor slumber, but distinguish yourselves.” Women had to do their share of the work if Black Americans would ever see true equality. Women had long played a special role, Stewart believed. Black mothers held one key to real freedom: their children, who in next generations would steer Black Americans forward. Stewart insisted that women take pride in their contributions to the political future. They should not shy away from the challenge, and she chided: “Shall it any longer be said of the daughters of Africa, they have no ambition, they have no force? By no means.”40
Stewart dared to go further, calling for women to play a part in politics, well beyond the domestic sphere. Anything less was to waste women’s skills and experience in a community that needed all the resources it could muster: “How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?” Black women needed to lead despite the distinct degradations that marred their lives. She pointed the finger at white Bostonians, and by implication all white Americans, for the sexual debasement of Black women. They had “caused the daughters of Africa to commit whoredoms and fornications.” This would end, Stewart insisted, only when Black women seized their own power and resisted assault, coercion, and compromise.
When the invitations to speak in public arrived, Stewart did not see controversy coming. She dwelled, after all, in the bosom of Black Boston. She carefully crafted her remarks, and the heat of her ideas burned. With great courage, Stewart made her way first to Franklin Hall and then to the African Masonic Hall to face curious crowds. She took a deep breath and spoke. How long did it take before people began to squirm uncomfortably, glance around skeptically, or clear their throats to unsettle Stewart just a little? Did some talk back or heckle? Stewart never reported precisely how she knew that her ideas were unwelcome and that her audacious challenge to the authority of men was out of bounds. We only know that she felt the rebuke strongly enough that she quit.41
On a September day in 1833, Stewart got ready for her very last appearance at a public podium. Did she select just the right dress, don a piece of jewelry that made her feel powerful, or carry a special trinket for luck? It would not be an easy time. Her critics had driven Stewart to speak yet again, but only to say goodbye. She had long known contempt: “It was contempt for my moral and religious opinions in private that drove me thus before a public.” Though opposition to Stewart had surfaced, she did not simply fold. Instead, Stewart used her last speech to make a record of what it meant to be a woman who broke barriers. She echoed Jarena Lee: “What if I am a woman; is not the God of ancient times the God of these modern days? Did he not raise up Deborah… queen Esther… Mary Magdalene… the women of Samaria… holy women [who] ministered unto Christ and the apostles?” God sanctioned women like Stewart even if men did not: “God at this eventful period should raise up your own females to strive, by their example both in public and private, to assist those who are endeavoring to stop the strong current of prejudice that flows so profusely against us at present.” She warned those who had been against her to be wary of deriding other women. “No longer ridicule their efforts,” she said, “it will be counted for sin.”42
Stewart retired from public life. Although retired is too strong a word. She did not retreat, nor did she abandon her pathbreaking ideas. She did take a new approach. In the decades following her final speech in Boston, Stewart continued as a teacher. In her classrooms—from Boston to New York and Washington, DC—Stewart trained new generations of young African American women in public speaking. She dispensed formal lessons in the art of elocution, how to use breath and voice, posture and gesture, tenor and tone to move and to persuade audiences. Her experience there, alone at Boston’s podiums, was its own lesson: women who stepped out of bounds could expect trouble when they put their bodies on the line.43
SOME WOMEN CHOSE the pen instead of the podium or pulpit. Appearing in print, their challenges to men’s authority have survived. Cloistered at home, by candlelight, women found that penning a letter to the editor constituted another way to enter politics. At the same time, the written word promised to go far and last a long time. Readers shared newspapers, clipped notable pieces, and returned to them later, long after spoken words had evaporated. Though no one would boo them on the pages of a newspaper, women still risked their reputations when they published, especially when they vied with men for power. It was a risky business that led some women to use pseudonyms when they wrote for the press.
Sarah Mapps Douglass and Philadelphia’s Female Literary Association used their pens as weapons when they gently rivaled the city’s men. In 1834, the women planned to celebrate the First of August, the marking of what would become known as West Indian Emancipation Day. That day, Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 went into force. When the day arrived, Philadelphia’s leading men turned out for a dinner that included a long series of toasts. When the women presented a satin banner that hailed the “birth day of British emancipation,” they never spoke a word, reduced to little more than symbols. Douglass rightly anticipated that, despite extensive speechifying, women would be muzzled. But she had a plan.44
For Douglass, how to also mark the occasion was a delicate matter, requiring the women to plan carefully or be overshadowed by their fathers, husbands, and brothers. They chose the following night, August 2, to gather for their own commemoration, and then staged a different type of affair. Women chaired the event, setting the agenda and directing the proceedings, with precision. Members read aloud essays selected especially for the occasion and presided over men who attended by invitation only. Journalist Benjamin Lundy offered a brief address, while Presbyterian minister Stephen Gloucester said a few prayers. But the women remained in charge. The Liberator’s headline read: “Female Celebration of the First of August.” The event stood apart and alone.45
Sarah Mapps Douglass, “A token of love from me to thee.” Amy Matilda Cassey Album. Watercolor
LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA
Douglass was born into public life. Her parents, Cyrus and Grace, esteemed members of Philadelphia’s Black activist circles, raised their daughter to take on the burdens of her community and her conscience. But her road would not be smooth. Born at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Douglass confronted an unprecedented set of questions about her place as a woman. It’s not likely that she met Maria Stewart, but certainly she read Stewart’s speeches in the pages of The Liberator. She may not have witnessed Jarena Lee’s preaching—but in spirit the two women were close. Douglass’s home sanctuary, the Quaker Arch Street Meeting House, was just a short, twenty-minute walk from the AME Church’s Mother Bethel, where Lee was a member. The generation of women to which Lee, Stewart, and Douglass belonged served the public good while honoring the sense that they must also break with stereotypes about womanhood.46
Douglass spent her entire life as a teacher. She was formally educated in Philadelphia, preparing to assume responsibility for her own classroom. She might have continued in that vein had not the abolitionist cause called to her, as it did to so many free African Americans. In Philadelphia, she linked arms with other women to form the city’s Female Literary Association in 1831. Black women led the society, one that expanded their intellectual ambitions through meditation, conversation, reading, and speaking. A robust sympathy with enslaved people infused all their work, and they built up their political acumen by hearing one another’s voices and testing new ideas.47
Women’s literary associations became increasingly common in the 1830s. Women—Black and white—who aspired to better education, skilled jobs, and the ability to engage in political debates banded together in cities and towns throughout the northern United States. Some women built upon very limited schooling, while others moved beyond their study of literature and the arts. Douglass and her friends distinguished their association by insisting that it be highly visible to the public. They set out to make a statement and, under Douglass’s leadership, the Female Literary Association broadcast its existence, joining the confluence of activists who published their ideas and their proceedings in The Liberator.48
The first challenge that Douglass and her associates confronted was setting the rules that would govern their collaboration. The women gathered for self-improvement, and they adopted structures similar to those of antislavery societies, church conventions, and political gatherings. They drafted a constitution that gave the group a legal identity and put on paper a provocative idea: men’s leadership was unnecessary because women knew how to convene and preside over their own associations. The constitution provided for officers, elections, prescribed duties, membership, and the ongoing operation, all of which ensured the women’s independence. Douglass and her friends also hoped to spark a broader movement, one not confined to their city. They came together to “induce our colored sisters in other places to imitate their example.” Black women’s public work could be widespread and collective.49
Alongside the association’s constitution, Douglass published a letter, signed with her pen name, Zillah, a Hebrew word for “shadow,” likely borrowed from Genesis. Douglass revealed her commitment to influencing the course of politics. She commented on a bill pending before the Pennsylvania legislature that proposed restricting the travel of free people of color into and out of the state. Douglass jumped in, both measured and confident: “I do not despair on account of the Bill,” she began. Douglass recommended a way forward that began with the study of historical figures, such Barbara Blaugdon, the seventeenth-century Quaker preacher. Douglass found inspiration and example in women’s humility, fortitude, and faith in God. She called it an “invisible power.” Douglass also offered her own observations. She was encouraged by seeing in Philadelphia Black and white Americans “mingling together… without a shadow of disgust.” Her piece illustrated a distinctly Black woman’s approach to law and politics that built upon women’s history and women’s insights above all else.50
Imagine Douglass, intently reading the pages of The Liberator, carefully dissecting various positions before penning her response. As she wrote, candles burned down and quill nibs wore out. The newspaper’s pages gave Douglass an opportunity to engage in open debate before an audience. She weighed in, for example, on the troubled prospect of Black Americans emigrating away from the United States. She knew that pressures, such as colonization and Black laws, tempted some to consider self-deportation. Douglass also saw how emissaries from Haiti—the only independent Black Republic in the Americas—toured major cities and enticed Black migrants to the Caribbean nation. Douglass did not mince words when she sparred in the pages of The Liberator. Dispensing with pleasantries and ritual politeness, she countered a correspondent who went by the name of “Woodby” as having been “entirely mistaken” in their understanding of Douglass’s position on emigration. And then, Douglass mocked Woodby as unprepared for a serious debate: “I wish you would read what is said on emigration.”51
Douglass never spoke expressly about how it felt to depart from the role of helpmeet. What she did, however, revealed what she thought. Her work with the Female Literary Association demonstrated shrewd leadership that used a women’s platform to enter political debates. Was she thinking about rights? Did she believe herself to be specially oppressed as a woman? Whatever her private thoughts, as Douglass pressed up against conventions—especially by creating vehicles for women’s organization—she became a peer to women like Jarena Lee and Maria Stewart.
IN CITIES LIKE Philadelphia and Boston, Black women did not go unnoticed. They gathered in church sanctuaries and meeting halls. They exchanged ideas in pamphlets and newspapers. They met one another and broader audiences when they stood at podiums and pulpits. But they also lived their lives on the streets, in shops, and as audience members in the entertainment venues of the nation’s towns and cities. Daily rhythms and habits changed in the 1820s. Social life moved from the privacy of parlors out into parks, sidewalks, and shops. African American women joined these teeming crowds, where the people of American cities mixed like never before. Women like Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, and Sarah Mapps Douglass moved freely through their cities and learned the pleasure of the public gatherings they frequented. They also assumed risks. As they became more visible, Black women opened themselves to a new brand of racism, one that critiqued their aspirations, daily lives, and their very bodies. Blackness, some proposed, excluded them from middle-class, urban culture.
Edward W. Clay, Life in Philadelphia, Plate 8, “Miss Chloe and Mr. Cesar,” ca. 1827
LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA
Images served as powerful weapons in a war against Black women. In the windows of print shops, on the walls of coffee houses and saloons, and on parlor tables, pictures—accessible even to those who could not read—derided Black women. In the late 1820s, a series of fourteen lithographs titled Life in Philadelphia appeared, with eleven of the images featuring African Americans. The artist, Edward Clay, portrayed women like Lee, Stewart, and Douglass as women shopping for luxury goods, strolling in parks, hosting tea parties, attending balls, and bantering with the opposite sex—all in the public eye.52
Clay used his lithographs to denigrate Black women. He caricatured them, had them uttering malapropisms, wearing clothing of exaggerated proportions, and adopting ungraceful postures. His depictions promoted the idea that Black women were less-than-respectably middle class, they only pretended to be so by adopting the mores and customs of that class. Clay’s parodies suggested that Black women, despite great efforts, could never be more than amusingly inadequate imitations of white ladies.
Clay’s ideas spread far from Philadelphia. The racism he promoted found audiences beyond a local scene. The Life in Philadelphia series circulated widely. Print shops from Philadelphia and New York to Baltimore and New Orleans sold and reprinted it. It spawned a parallel series titled Life in New York and even found salience in London, where printmakers issued elaborate reproductions for British audiences. Eventually, Clay’s images adorned illustrated books, newspapers, broadsides, sheet music, and fine French wallpaper. Black women might step into the public spotlight, but once there they would have to fight against an arsenal of cruel and demeaning stereotypes.53
Jarena Lee (b. 1783). Frontispiece, Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee (Philadelphia, 1849)
LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA
Surely, Jarena Lee had these demeaning images in mind when she commissioned a portrait. The face of this inspired and learned woman greets readers of her memoir, The Life and Religious Experience of Mrs. Jarena Lee. Lee posed carefully, sitting in an elegant curved back chair, one elbow resting on a table laden with books. “What is she reading?” the portrait invites viewers to wonder. She is dressed carefully, a fine but plain bonnet tied under her chin, a shawl of white gauze draping her shoulders and torso. Though her hands are modestly at rest, the gesture should not be misunderstood, nor should the woman. In her right hand Lee holds a quill, a reminder that she is the author of her own text, a woman accustomed to handling fine writing instruments and to firing off the ideas they produced.54