In the spring of 1832, a free, young African American woman, Maria W. Miller Stewart, rose to address a Boston audience. During the next three years, Stewart made a total of four public addresses, published a political pamphlet and a collection of meditations, and then retired deliberately from the public stage, seemingly defeated by the obstacles arrayed against her as both an African American and a female speaker.[1] Some critics give Stewart credit as the first American-born woman to deliver a public address before what was then called a "promiscuous" audience, one composed of both men and women.[2] It is more likely that Deborah Sampson Gannett, who disguised herself as a male soldier to serve in the American Revolution and subsequently lectured about her experiences, deserves that honor.[3] However, Gannett’s lectures were biographical rather than political. Maria Stewart was the first woman of record to confront promiscuous audiences with the contemporary political issues of race and gender during the troubled period leading to the Civil War.[4]
Stewart’s unique place in political history may be captured by William Andrew’s description of her as "the first Black feminist-abolitionist in America."[5] According to Marilyn Richardson, she also was "[l]ikelythe first African American [of either gender] to lecture in defense of women’s rights."[6] Speaking six years before Angelina and Sarah Grimke and nearly a full decade before Frederick Douglass began his own public career in 1841, Stewart anticipates the great abolitionist, civil rights and women’s rights speakers that followed her.[7] In her four speeches are arguments, themes, and images echoed and given larger play not simply by Douglass and the Grimkes but by Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, and decades later by W.E.B. Dubois.[8] Stewart’s unique and visible presence was almost guaranteed to make her a target. Although initially she found an audience, before long she was castigated for her public role and "doors in Boston soon closed to her."[9]
The opposition that Stewart encountered as a speaker in 1832-1833 is understandable. Despite the existence of female preachers and missionaries in the early part of the nineteenth century,[10] political speech was still deemed the exclusive domain of men. Yet Maria W. Miller Stewart poses a mystery for rhetorical critics even today. Why is this true pioneer so often overlooked in studies of African American and women’s oratory? When her speeches are acknowledged in collections of rhetoric, why are they designated as religious rather than political--making Stewart, as Lora Romero puts it, "the stepchild of Teresa of Avila (as opposed to the sister of Nat Turner)"?[11] Although a talented wielder of religious allusion and argument, Stewart’s message was both political and militant. For Stewart, "militancy" did not mean violence but the adoption of a more activist stance, one that challenged the passive acceptance of discrimination. Later militant reform movements would utilize dramatic demonstrations and civil disobedience to publicize the need for reform and force legislative action. Maria W. Stewart, through rhetorical devices alone, accomplished this same publication of the grievances suffered by free African Americans. By her very presence on the speaker's platform, Stewart challenged the boundaries set for women and free African Americans and enacted a new equality.
This examination of Stewart’s 1832 Franklin Hall Address will reveal a woman not only groundbreaking in her persona as a speaker and the nature of the audiences she addressed but also in the rich and varied arguments she constructed to oppose constraints she faced as a woman and free black American. In her address, Stewart followed two rhetorical paths. One is uncompromising and confrontational, a direct indictment of oppression and a scorching rebuke of those unwilling to struggle actively against it. Yet this activist stance is interwoven with a detailed narrative based on personal experience, and an evangelical rendering of the trials of a great people struggling against tremendous odds. Her sympathetic description of a free black nation still held by invisible chains ultimately provided hope that change would come. Through a rhetoric that was at once caustic, militant, nurturing and hopeful, Maria Stewart reflected the complexity of the struggle for freedom of Northern black Americans.
In many ways, the free black community of Boston in 1832 provided the ideal location for the emergence of Maria Stewart as a speaker. It formed a "background of religious, militant activism"[12] that became the basis of Stewart’s rhetorical force. An examination of the lives of free African Americans in Boston provides a better understanding of the necessity for reform, a need that supplied the impetus for Stewart's rhetoric.
