Maria W. Stewart

Maria W. Stewart (1803-1879) was a pioneering Black abolitionist, a defiant champion of women’s rights, and a bold and militant orator. 

Born free as Maria Miller in Hartford, Connecticut, she was likely the first Black American to lecture about women’s rights – focusing particularly on the rights of Black women – and to make public anti-slavery speeches. She was also the first U.S.-born woman to address mixed audiences that included men, at a time when Biblical injunctions against women teaching were interpreted as prohibiting women from speaking in public. 

Driven by political and religious zeal, Maria Stewart wrote and spoke on a whole range of topics of vital importance to the Black community, including abolition, equal rights, educational opportunities, the colonization movement – a controversial scheme to resettle Black Americans in Africa – and racial pride and unity. 

In her three short years in Boston, Massachusetts, Stewart was involved with a number of local Black institutions, including the Massachusetts General Colored Association and the Boston Afric-American Female Intelligence Society. Her writings regularly appeared in The Liberator, the abolitionist newspaper co-founded and edited by the White abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp; and many were re-published as pamphlets and volumes for sale in support of the anti-slavery cause. 

Maria Stewart had a sadly short-lived marriage. In 1826, she wed James W. Stewart, an independent shipping agent, who served in the War of 1812 against Britain and was a prisoner of war there; he died three years later. 

Passionate about education, Stewart taught school in New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. She was later matron at the Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, which catered to the medical needs of thousands of African Americans who came to the city during the Civil War. 

Maria Stewart is featured in Abolition Acre! A Black Freedom Trail in Boston, a self-guided trail of abolitionist sites in downtown Boston created by BHS.

Image above: "Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart" cover. Courtesy of the Museum of African American History in Boston, Massachusetts. Read the publication here.