The Setting and Context. The year 1831 marked an important sea change in the pursuit of the Immediate Abolition of slavery in the United States. For the first time, white men were listening with respect and attention to what African-Americans were telling them about the pervasive racism affecting every dimension of life for free Blacks in the North, the searing horrors of slavery throughout the country, and the free Black community’s resistance to any forced removal – euphemistically called “colonization” – to Africa. The most important beacon of this new alliance between white and Black Abolitionists came in the pages of The Liberator, a Boston-based newspaper published by the white editor William Lloyd Garrison. The Liberator’s subscribers and many of its key financial supporters were African-Americans (men and women); the paper was understood by Free Blacks as a community resource. Garrison not only heeded the voices and published writings by Black men, but he also amplified the voice of a Black woman speaker – the profound thinker Maria Stewart – and recruited the well-known popular white woman author, Lydia Maria Child, to the cause of Immediate Abolition. When news of Nat Turner’s Rebellion in Virginia in late August 1831 reached Boston, Garrison noted Turner’s righteous cause and bravery rather than condemning him. Stewart went even further in justifying Turner. The die was cast – Black and white, men and women, would work together to end the moral outrage of slavery, and accelerate the still-to-be-completed struggle to erase racism.

For Further Reference

• Garrison, William Lloyd, editor. The Liberator – full issues 1831-1865 available on line at The Liberator Files
• Hinks, Peter P. To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
• Karcher, Carolyn L. The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. Durham North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1994.
• Mayer, Henry. All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
• Richardson, Marilyn. Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987
• Sinha, Manisha. The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.
• Waters, Kristin. Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought. Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 2022