Author’s Note: Courage rarely announces itself. It forms through risk, resistance, and consequence long before history chooses names to remember. The Courage They Didn’t Teach moves decade by decade from the mid-1700s onward, setting aside hero worship to focus on moments when retreat looked safer but resolve demanded sacrifice. Please note that, since these people weren’t readily celebrated, historical information may be light at times.
Each entry follows one life that faced danger, opposition, or erasure and stood firm without promise of reward. Some endured violence in the open. Others absorbed pressure in silence. Together, these stories show courage as a skill shaped by striving and refined long before applause, if applause comes at all.
An old church lectern can look harmless when nobody stands behind it. Wood, nails, polish, maybe a Bible resting on top. Yet in the wrong hands, or the right ones, it becomes heavier than a cannon. Maria Stewart stepped behind such a weapon in an America that expected women to listen, black women to obey, and free black women to feel grateful for scraps of liberty. She didn’t ask permission from the age she lived in. She spoke as though truth already had permission enough.
Maria Stewart: 1803-1879
I was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1803; was left an orphan at five years of age; was bound out in a clergyman’s family; had the seeds of piety and virtue early sown in my mind, but was deprived of the advantages of education, though my soul thirsted for knowledge. Left them at fifteen years of age; attended Sabbath schools until I was twenty…
At some point, she came to Boston and, in 1826, married James W. Stewart, a shipping agent and veteran of the War of 1812. The Stewarts joined the small but vibrant free Black community in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood. They attended the African Baptist Church, located in the African Meeting House. David Walker, a radical abolitionist whose pamphlet Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World called for Black people to fight against enslavement and oppression, knew the couple and influenced Maria Stewart’s thinking. When Walker and his wife moved out of their former home at what is now 81 Joy Street, the Stewarts moved in. Just three years after their marriage, James Stewart died. Though James left Maria ample money in his will, “the executors literally robbed and cheated her out of every cent,” leaving her destitute, according to her friend Louise C. Hatton.
In December 1829, James Stewart died; the marriage had produced no children. Although Maria Stewart was left with a substantial inheritance, she was defrauded of it by the white executors of her husband’s will after a drawn-out court battle. Once again, she was forced to turn to domestic service to support herself. In 1830, partly due to grief over her husband’s death, Stewart underwent a religious conversion. A year later, she made a “public profession of my faith in Christ,” dedicating herself to God’s service. For Stewart, her newfound religious fervor went hand-in-hand with political activism: she resolved to become a “strong advocate for the cause of God and for the cause of freedom.”
On September 21, 1832, Stewart delivered a second lecture, this time to an audience that also included men. She spoke at Franklin Hall, the site of the New England Anti-Slavery Society meetings. She called for civil rights for northern blacks and questioned emigration to Africa, which was then promoted by the American Colonization Society.
Garrison published both speeches in the pages of The Liberator. He published the text of her speeches there, putting them into the Ladies Department. He also published a second pamphlet of her writings as Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart.
After moving to New York City, Stewart remained an activist, attending, for example, the 1837 Women’s Anti-slavery Convention, but she never again spoke in public. She supported herself by teaching in public schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn and eventually became an assistant principal of the Williamsburg School in Brooklyn.
Apparently, after losing her teaching position in New York, Stewart moved to Baltimore in 1852 or 1853. There, she taught privately. In 1861, she moved to Washington, D.C., where she taught school again during the Civil War. Around 1870, Stewart was appointed to head housekeeping at the Freedmen’s Hospital and Asylum in Washington, D.C. Following Sojourner Truth in the post, she managed the cleaning staff.
Near the end of her life, a War of 1812 pension connected to her husband helped publish a new edition of her writings in 1879, the year she died.
In 1878, a law was passed granting pensions to widows of War of 1812 veterans. Stewart used the unexpected money to publish a second edition of Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart. The book, which appeared on December 17, 1879, was introduced by supporting letters from Garrison and others. Shortly after the book’s publication, Maria Stewart died at the Freedmen’s Hospital at age 76. Her obituary in The People’s Advocate, a Washington-area black newspaper, acknowledged that Stewart had struggled for years with little recognition: “Few, very few know of the remarkable career of this woman whose life has just drawn to a close.” She was buried in Graceland Cemetery in Washington, DC.
Next up in the series: David Walker
David Walker comes next, and his story belongs right beside Stewart’s. Born free in North Carolina around 1796, Walker moved to Boston, built a life as a used clothing dealer, joined the city’s free black activist community, and wrote the 1829 “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.” His pamphlet attacked slavery, colonization, racial hypocrisy, timid Christianity, and the gap between America’s founding promises and America’s lived cruelties. Copies reached the South, alarmed slaveholding authorities, and helped push abolition toward a sharper, more urgent phase. Walker died in Boston in 1830, but the words he left behind kept moving after him.
Other columns in this series
