Maria Stewart - Town Hall Speech

 

Who was Maria Stewart?

Maria Stewart: Why Slavery Must End

Establishing My Purpose

Friends and fellow citizens, I rise before you not merely as a woman, but as a child of God and a member of a people whose rights have been denied for far too long.

I was born free, yet I learned early that freedom in name does not always mean freedom in life. Orphaned as a young child, I was bound out as a servant and deprived of a proper education, although my soul thirsted for knowledge. According to the National Park Service’s biography of Maria Stewart, she was orphaned at five, bound out as an indentured servant, and deprived of the educational opportunities she desired.

My own experience leads me to a greater truth.

Slavery Violates God’s Moral Law

Slavery is wrong because it violates the moral law of God. How can any nation call itself Christian while treating human beings as property?

OG Speech

The enslaved possess minds capable of learning, hearts capable of faith, and souls equal before their Creator. No person was born to be owned, beaten, sold, or separated from family.

In my writing, Religion and the Pure Princ
iples of Morality, I called upon Americans to build society upon justice, faith, and moral responsibility. Religion without justice is an empty profession. Both Encyclopaedia Britannica’s biography of Maria Stewart and the National Park Service’s historical account discuss this work and its connection to Stewart’s religious and abolitionist message.

Yet slavery’s chains reach farther than the plantation.

Ignorance and Prejudice Are Also Chains

Slavery does not injure only those held in physical bondage. Racial prejudice also denies free Black Americans access to education, employment, political rights, and the opportunity to improve their condition.

As I have declared, “There are no chains so galling as the chains of ignorance, no fetters so binding as those that bind the soul.” This statement appears in Stewart’s 1832 address, preserved in The American Yawp’s primary-source collection.

When Black children are denied education and Black adults are confined to servile labor, prejudice continues the work of slavery. A nation cannot claim liberty while deliberately preventing an entire people from using their God-given abilities.

Therefore, I appeal not only to your sympathy, but to your conscience.

A Call to Act

I call upon Black Americans to seek knowledge, cultivate unity, and demand the rights that belong to us.

Maria Stewart

I call upon women to develop their minds and join the struggle for justice. We must not be told that public questions belong only to men. By speaking here today, I exercise the equality for which I argue.

I also call upon white citizens to reject both slavery and prejudice. It is not enough to disapprove silently. If injustice is allowed to continue, silence becomes its protection.

Let this nation remove both the visible chains of slavery and the invisible chains of ignorance. Let America become what it claims to be: a land in which liberty belongs to every human being.

Until that day arrives, I will continue to speak.

Thank you.

AI Disclosure: AI was used to help form this speech. It used information from resources to create a speech written in Maria Stewarts Point of View on her opinion and thoughts of slavery and why it is wrong.