Illustration accompanying the text of a lecture delivered by Maria W. Stewart on September 21, 1832, as reprinted in The Liberator, vol. 2, no. 46, November 17, 1832. Digital Commonwealth.
In this semiquincentennial year, as an accompaniment to Lapham’s Revolutionary America, a special series of The World in Time, we are publishing readings from the past and the present that speak to the meaning of the nation’s founding.
Among the many figures whose portraits Jill Lepore draws in These Truths, her single-volume history of the U.S., is Maria W. Stewart, a member of Beacon Hill’s free Black community in antebellum Boston. “In the 1820s, she’s born again, swept up in this evangelical revival known as the Second Great Awakening,” Lepore told Lewis H. Lapham on The World in Time. “She took that spirit of evangelical Christianity and applied it to her reading of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” In 1831, Stewart published the essay excerpted here in William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator. Titled “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build,” the essay eulogizes Black abolitionist David Walker, who’d died of tuberculosis in 1830 at the age of thirty-three. It was subsequently collected in Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart.
This is the land of freedom. The press is at liberty. Every man has a right to express his opinion. Many think, because your skins are tinged with a sable hue, that you are an inferior race of beings; but God does not consider you as such. He hath formed and fashioned you in His own glorious image, and hath bestowed upon you reason and strong powers of intellect. He hath made you to have dominion over the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, and the fishes of the sea. He hath crowned you with glory and honor; hath made you but a little lower than the angels; and, according to the Constitution of these United States, he hath made all men free and equal. Then why should one worm say to another, “Keep you down there, while I sit up yonder; for I am better than thou.” It is not the color of the skin that makes the man, but it is the principle formed within the soul.
Many will suffer for pleading the cause of oppressed Africa, and I shall glory in being one of her martyrs; for I am firmly persuaded that the God in whom I trust is able to protect me from the rage and malice of mine enemies, and from them that will rise up against me; and if there is no other way for me to escape, He is able to take me to himself, as He did the most noble, fearless, and undaunted David Walker.
How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles? Until union, knowledge, and love begin to flow among us. How long shall a mean set of men flatter us with their smiles, and enrich themselves with our hard earnings; their wives’ fingers sparkling with rings, and they themselves laughing at our folly? Until we begin to promote and patronize each other. Shall we be a mere byword among the nations any longer? Shall they laugh us to scorn forever? Do you ask, what can we do? Do you ask the disposition I would have you possess? Possess the spirit of independence. The Americans do, and why should not you? Possess the spirit of men, bold and enterprising, fearless and undaunted. Sue for your rights and privileges. Know the reason that you cannot attain them. Weary them with your importunities. You can but die, if you make the attempt; and we shall certainly die if you do not. The Americans have practiced nothing but headwork these two hundred years, and we have done their drudgery. And is it not high time for us to imitate their examples, and practice headwork too, and keep what we have got, and get what we can? We need never to think that anybody is going to feel interested for us, if we do not feel interested for ourselves.
Were every gentleman in America to realize as one that they had got to become bondmen, and their wives, their sons, and their daughters, servants forever to Great Britain, like Belshazzar, their joints would become loosened, and tremblingly would smite one against another; their countenance would be filled with horror, every nerve and muscle would be forced into action; their souls would recoil at the very thought, their hearts would die within them, and death would be far more preferable. Then why have not Afric’s sons a right to feel the same? Are not their wives, their sons, and their daughters as dear to them as those of the white man’s? Certainly God has not deprived them of the divine influences of his Holy Spirit, which is the greatest of all blessings, if they ask him. Then why should man any longer deprive his fellow man of equal rights and privileges? O America, America, foul and indelible is thy stain! Dark and dismal is the cloud that hangs over thee for thy cruel wrongs and injuries to the fallen sons of Africa. The blood of her murdered ones cries to heaven for vengeance against thee. Thou art almost become drunken with the blood of her slain; thou hast enriched thyself through her toils and labors; and now thou refuseth to make even a small return.
O ye great and mighty men of America, ye rich and powerful ones, many of you will call for the rocks and mountains to fall upon you, and to hide you from the wrath of the lamb, and from him that sitteth upon the throne; while many of the sable-skinned Africans you now despise, will shine in the kingdom of heaven as the stars, forever and ever. Charity begins at home, and those that provide not for their own, are worse than infidels. We know that you are raising contributions to aid the gallant Poles; we know that you have befriended Greece and Ireland; and you have rejoiced with France for her heroic deeds of valor. You have acknowledged all the nations of the earth, except Haiti; and you may publish, as far as the East is from the West, that you have two millions of negroes, who aspire no higher than to bow at your feet and to court your smiles. You may kill, tyrannize, and oppress as much as you choose, until our cry shall come up before the throne of God; for I am firmly persuaded that he will not suffer you to quell the proud, fearless, and undaunted spirit of the Africans forever; for in his own time, he is able to plead his own cause against you, and to pour out upon you the ten plagues of Egypt. We will not come out against you with swords and staves, as against a thief; but we will tell you that our souls are fired with the same love of liberty and independence with which your souls are fired. We will tell you that too much of your blood flows in our veins, and too much of your color in our skins, for us not to possess your spirits. We will tell you that it is our gold that clothes you in fine linen and purple, and causes you to fare sumptuously every day; and it is the blood of our fathers and the tears of our brethren that have enriched your soils. And we claim our rights. We will tell you that we are not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that can do no more; but we will tell you whom we do fear. We fear Him who is able, after he hath killed, to destroy both soul and body in hell forever. Then, my brethren, sheath your swords, and calm your angry passions. Stand still, and know that the Lord he is God. Vengeance is his, and he will repay. It is a long lane that has no turn. America has risen to her meridian. When you begin to thrive, she will begin to fall. God hath raised you up a Walker and a Garrison. Though Walker sleeps, yet he lives, and his name shall be held in everlasting remembrance. I, even I, who am but a child, inexperienced to any of you, am a living witness to testify unto you this day, that I have seen the wicked in great power, spreading himself like a green bay tree, and lo, he passed away.